East Anglian Disasters

Introduction

Robinson Crusoe, the castaway hero of Daniel Defoe’s famous 1719 novel, sailed from Yarmouth Roads to begin his adventure, but he had gone only a few miles along the Norfolk coast to Winterton when his ship was wrecked in a North Sea storm typical of that stretch of sea.

In 1692, in what became known as the Great Gale, 200 vessels were lost in one night at Winterton. In a severe north-easterly gale 140 were driven ashore and wrecked with the loss of over 1,000 crewmen. The masses of floating wreckage and bodies became hazards in themselves. A disaster of its day, widely reported, that incident may have given Defoe the idea that was to lead to the start of Robinson Crusoe.

The treacherous nature of that part of the coast was made obvious to him when he toured parts of East Anglia in 1722. Despite rights of wreck belonging, in most places, either to the Crown or to the Lord of the Manor, he found that the local people were skilled salvagers, filling storehouses with whatever came their way, and making use of every bit of the wrecks themselves. He wrote that there was not ‘scarce a barn or a shed, or a stable, nay, not the pales of their yards and gardens, not a hogstye, not a necessary house, but what was built of old planks, beams, wales and timbers etc, the wrecks of ships and the ruins of mariners’ and merchants’ fortunes’.

Charles Dickens discovered a less stormy Great Yarmouth when he spent some time at the Royal Hotel in Marine Parade in the 1840s and his hero, David Copperfield, found the bustling resort ‘upon the whole, the finest place in the universe’. Dickens had first visited East Anglia in 1836 as a young reporter for the Morning Chronicle. For over two decades after that he regularly visited the area. Mr Pickwick, in Pickwick Papers, stayed at the Great White Horse, Ipswich, and The Angel, Bury St Edmunds, both hotels that Dickens himself stayed at in 1859 and 1861.

A century later, more than two centuries after Defoe’s visit to East Anglia, Arthur Ransome was writing his series of children’s adventure stories. Ransome, of an East Anglian family of Quakers, had two geographical loves – the Lake District and the watery parts of East Anglia. At one time he lived at Leverington, on the river Orwell, and between 1932 and 1940 five of his stories – Peter Duck, Coot Club, We Didn’ t Mean to Go to Sea, Secret Water and The Big Six – had settings in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex.

Eric Blair, who lived at Southwold in the 1930s, took his pen name, George Orwell, from that of the river when he wrote his political satires, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four, and he set The Clergyman’s Daughter partly in Southwold.

They, and many other authors, who have lived in or visited East Anglia have been drawn by its uniqueness and often have been inspired to make it an important part of their writing. They have looked over its far horizons, wet and dry, known its life, its heritage and its people, and have been inspired to create exciting fantasy. But East Anglia’s reality has been as colourful.

Hereward the Wake and his band of dispossessed Anglo-Saxons defied the conquering Normans at the island abbey of Ely in the eleventh century, while in the seventeenth Oliver Cromwell of Huntingdon, always an East Anglian, fought a Civil War to take the throne from Charles I and become the Lord Protector of England. Even in death not all of him left his home region. His head remains in Sidney Sussex, his old college in Cambridge.

There had been no need to create fictional heroes when the great eighteenth century navigator explorer, George Vancouver, was a King’s Lynn man, and in Burnham Thorpe was born ‘the greatest sailor since the world began’, Admiral Horatio Nelson, one of East Anglia’s most celebrated sons by the time of his death in the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, Madame Marie Tussaud brought her travelling waxworks exhibition to East Anglia with, alongside effigies of notorious criminals, casts of the heads of aristocrats guillotined in that most continental of disasters the French Revolution. Unable to return to France because of the England-France War, she toured fairs in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire until she found a permanent location in Baker Street, London.

But East Anglia, over the centuries, had had disasters of its own. Its history could tell of that as plainly as imported replicas of severed heads, popular though they were with the penny-paying crowds.

The earliest of those disasters, other than ravaging incursions by the sea, were invasions by foreign forces. The penalty for being close to mainland Europe and Scandinavia was that successively, from the Celts to the Romans in the first century AD, the Vikings of the ninth century to the Normans of the Conquest in the eleventh, the region was obliged to play host. It was 1667 before the last enemy force landed in Suffolk, when the Dutch attacked Landguard Fort. A feared Napoleonic invasion at the start of the nineteenth century never came, but east coast armed defences against the threat were built in 1809. The seventeen Martello towers can still be seen along the coast, between Shotley and Aldeburgh, at points where an invading army could most easily have been landed ashore. Some are now used by coastguard services.

Christian from the seventh century, a religion propagated by St Felix of Burgundy, the ‘Apostle of the East Angles’, many monastic houses became established in the region, at Bury St Edmunds, Ely, Peterborough and other places in the fenland. Most were sacked by the Danes in the ninth century and the smaller ones went out of existence. Others recovered to accumulate great wealth and estates until, after the arrival of the Normans, there were at least eighty thriving in East Anglia.

The Normans rebuilt churches plundered by the Danes and, as something of a public relations exercise, they enhanced them with massive towers. Sadly, catastrophe was built into them. Many of the region’s churches and cathedrals suffered disasters, retold here, but none can have been as spectacular as those of the towers. They dropped like Fred Dibnah’s chimneys. There were structural failures at Bury and Peterborough, but the collapse of the central tower at Ely in 1322 led to triumph over calamity as an Octagon was erected in its place to become the glory of the cathedral.

The Romans had fed their army throughout Britain on the corn grown in East Anglia on what was appreciated, even then, as prime agricultural land. They made the first attempts at fen drainage and created the first artificial waterway to carry the region’s produce to their legions in other areas and, in doing so, tried, to make farmers of some of the native Iceni. They made only an enemy of their queen, Bouddica, who told her men, ‘You have learned the difference between foreign tyranny and the free life of your ancestors’, as she led them in revolt against Roman rule. She lost, and took her own life. Tyranny, as she had seen it, won.

But for tyranny in the sixteenth century the monasteries needed to look no further than the king – Henry VIII. In amassing their vast estates the region’s religious foundations had become rich and acquired far more power than Henry liked. They would have to go. In 1553 came the first Act for the dissolution of the monasteries in England and their estates fell into the hands of self-enriching ‘new men’. In many instances, while sheep and wool increasingly ruled the nation’s economy and created wealth for the few, they enclosed common land and made agricultural labourers subservient and poor.

In a rising against their plight, led by Robert Kett of Wymondham, 20,000 men marched on Norwich. Kett is considered one of Norfolk’s heroes for inspiring the labourers to lay siege to the great city and to make their demands known but, as was usual in a popular rising, with never a real hope of success. Some 3,000 died, most of them the men who put food on the family table, however meagre. A disaster for many an innocent Norfolk family, and for the desolated city of Norwich.

The Great Fire of London of 1666, following the Great Plague, is a well-known historical event. But catastrophic town fires were commonplace at that time. Almost every town and large village burned in an age of open hearths and lighted candles when most buildings were of inflammable timber and thatch and fire precautions and the means of fighting fires were basic.

In Suffolk there were devastating fires at Beccles, Bungay, Bury St Edmunds, Debenham and Brandon. Most were rebuilt, but at Southwold, a prosperous fishing port badly damaged in a fire of 1659, there was no rebuilding. Seven greens were created instead of housing in the burned-out areas. Half of the racing town of Newmarket was destroyed in a fire of 1683 but, a good thing or a bad depending on allegiance, it saved the life of the king, Charles II. Resident in his palace across the High Street from the blaze, he was in little danger. But the smoke was more than he could bear. He left for London several days earlier than expected and so thwarted a planned ambush and assassination attempt at Rye House.

There was a fire of a different kind in the Cam-side village of Burwell in 1727 when a puppeteer bound for Cambridge’s Stourbridge Fair, the greatest annual fair in Europe, stopped to put on a show in a barn. An unexpected penny treat for the villagers. Stacked with straw trusses and roofed with tons of dry reed thatch it took only one lighted candle to turn the makeshift theatre into a box of flame. Eighty-one people, many of them children, died.

Even today, in an age of advanced navigational aids and weather forecasting, disasters still occur off the East Anglian coast in the notoriously stormy waters of the North Sea. Today the loss of one vessel is a disaster, but in the past numbers beyond count were lost, caught up in the violence of storm, running aground on shifting sandbanks or driven ashore by wind and tide. At the end of the nineteenth century there were so many wrecks on the beach at Happisburgh that Trinity House, with the power to remove or destroy non-Royal Navy shipwrecks, cleared them with explosives.

Traffic of merchant ships and colliers in the sea lanes was as heavy as that on a Bank Holiday motorway and fishing boats added to the congestion with, in the early years of the twentieth century, as many as 1,000 putting out from Yarmouth alone in the herring season in search of the ‘silver darlings’.

All who worked aboard vessels knew of the dangers and were the first, before the first official lifeboats, to risk their lives to save others, often coming by valuable salvage as they did so. And sometimes, perhaps in answer to prayer, they did not even need to put to sea to find it. There was the bonanza, on their doorstep, and it was an ill wind indeed that blew nobody a bit of good. A prayer of a vicar of St Mary’s in the Scilly Isles, asking the Lord to bless all sailors, would end, ‘But if it is Thy divine will that their ship shall be lost, then, we pray Thee, let it happen on our coast.’ It was a sentiment to which many an East Anglian would say ‘Amen’.

And their prayers were more than answered when, in a snow-driven gale on 24 February 1837, the steamer Raby Castle was wrecked on the shore close to Cley-next-the-Sea. Despite high seas, her seven crew and two passengers reached safety in the longboat. It was when the ship began to break up and shed her cargo of oranges, nuts, tea and spirits, then worth £5,000, that the fun began.

According to the Norfolk Chronicle, by seven o’clock in the morning there were 300 people on the beach. By eight o’clock there were 600, and then ‘the most outrageous and beastly conduct was exhibited’.

Some barrels of spirits were buried in the sand for later recovery while others were broached and people collected the spirits in whatever container they had to hand – in most cases their oilskin hats or their shoes. The outcome was inevitable. ‘Many men were conveyed from off the beach dead drunk and it is with disgust we add many women were in the same state.’

Some vicars of coastal churches, besides offering up prayers, may not question the occasional drop of something from a wreck coming their way. Others would try to prevent the wreck. Storms may have been acts of God, but they would avert the consequences if they could, placing a guiding light in their towers, visible for up to twenty miles out at sea along a flat, featureless coast, and, when that failed, burying the drowned seafarers in their churchyards. They served their communities well until the coming of the lights of Trinity House.

A lighthouse was erected at Happisburgh in 1791. Much needed but perhaps overdue. Trinity House was granted a charter by Henry VIII in 1514 to regulate pilotage on the Thames, its powers extended by Elizabeth I in 1566 to include the placing of sea-marks. They took a long time to reach all parts of one of the most dangerous coasts in Britain.

An historic wreck off Happisburgh in 1801 was that of HMS Invincible, sailing to join Nelson’s fleet for the Battle of Copenhagen. Aground on a sandbank, battered by gale and waves, she broke up, drowning 400 men, 119 of them later buried in Happisburgh churchyard, the resting place of others, before and after them, who fought the North Sea and lost.

In 1845 death by water struck seventy-nine of the inhabitants of Great Yarmouth as, like those in Burwell, they had been eagerly anticipating entertainment. A circus was in town and to advertise it a clown was to sail along the Bure in a washtub pulled by four harnessed geese.

People, many of them children, crowded onto a suspension bridge. They pressed to one side for a better view of the spectacle as it approached and the bridge collapsed, throwing them into the river to their deaths. The bridge had been about to be replaced by a more substantial structure able to carry the increased traffic which had come with the recently opened railway station at Vauxhall.

Railways changed life in East Anglia, as they did everywhere, helping to establish the region’s seaside resorts while carrying passengers, goods and mail quickly, cheaply and safely.

Safely until, on single-track lines, at Thorpe in September 1874 and Barnby at Christmas 1892 there were head-on collisions caused by fog and human error. Snow and ice caused the crash of the famous Flying Scotsman at Abbots Ripton in January 1876, but its derailment at Conington in March 1967 was not caused by the weather. It took a court case to decide if there had been error, human or inhuman. It was believed that a young signalman, deliberately or by accident, had opened a set of points as the express was speeding over them. Had he?

With nowhere in East Anglia more than fifty miles from the coast and its counties crossed by rivers and waterways, water, salt or fresh, is a feature of many people’s lives, today as in the past. There is a constant danger, given certain weather conditions, that parts of the region could suffer serious flooding.

The stories of three quite different twentieth century floods are told here, beginning with 1912 when excessive rain deluged the region and caused the Wensum to burst its banks to flood Norwich. In 1947, after a hard winter of snow and ice followed by a thaw and rain, the Fens were inundated by a sudden inrush of water from beyond the region, and in 1953 there came the worst peacetime disaster in British history. During the night of 31 January, in hurricane conditions, a tidal surge hit the entire length of the east coast. It resulted in the deaths of 307 people, most of them in Essex and Norfolk. Over 40,000 were evacuated and 150,000 acres of agricultural land were flooded - and the same, or worse, could happen again at any time despite heightened defences.

Almost everywhere in Britain suffered some level of disaster in the two World Wars. East Anglia, with the proximity to continental Europe which had brought past invaders, was again a target for bomb-carrying German airships in the First World War, the first time that civilians anywhere had had to experience airborne warfare. The first ever fatalities caused by attack from the air were in Great Yarmouth early in 1915, while a Zeppelin shot down at Theberton in June 1917 was the last to be destroyed over Britain.

Harwich harbour and approaches, from before the seventeenth century, was often the arena for East Anglia’s war at sea. In the Second World War German mines became a particular threat and in just four days in November 1939, in the earliest weeks of the war, three ships were mined and sunk with high loss of life - a Japanese and a Dutch passenger vessel and a Royal Navy destroyer,

In the air, the Zeppelin had been surpassed by the long-range bomber. Many East Anglian towns were bombed in the Second World War, some repeatedly, and often more than once on the same day. On 21 February 1941, Great Yarmouth had been raided four times by just after lunchtime and on 11 May 1953 eighteen German planes made a low-level attack just as breakfast was on the table, ‘indiscriminately bombing residential areas at the north end of the town’. One bomb destroyed most of the town’s Seymour Avenue.

Only three days later it was the turn of Newmarket. In what was a one-off, afternoon attack on the Suffolk racing town, a single Dornier dropped ten bombs and some incendiaries along a High Street crowded with market day shoppers, machine gunning as it went. Twenty-seven were killed and many were injured in one of the worst incidents in East Anglia.

As the war progressed, many civilians died but the first anywhere in mainland Britain had been Mr and Mrs Frederick Gill when a mine-laying Heinkel crashed onto their home in Victoria Road, Clacton, on 30 April 1940.

Along with other cities listed as ‘of significant historical interest’ in the German Baedeker guide book for tourists to Britain, Norwich was bombed in what became known as the Baedeker Blitz. On two nights at the end of April 1942, 297 high explosive bombs and thousands of incendiaries were dropped, killing 231 people, and more raids were to follow. Thousands of people began to ‘trekk’, leaving their homes in the city each night to sleep in the surrounding countryside, perhaps showing East Anglian caution rather than cowardice. Morale was not broken, boosted by a visit from King George VI from nearby Sandringham, even if the city was.

Broken but, by the gallantry of four men escaping total destruction, was the small Cambridgeshire town of Soham. On 2 June 1944, just four days before D-Day, the first wagon on a long train of bombs was found to be on fire. The engine’s fireman uncoupled the burning wagon and, with assistance from guard and signalman, it was driven away from the rest of the train before it exploded. Both the engine driver and fireman received the George Medal, the only time that two railwaymen have received it for the same incident.

Many of the airfields which had been set up throughout East Anglia during the war remained after its end, developed for USAF and RAF use, their location most vital while the Cold War threat lasted.

One such airfield was RAF Wyton, near Huntingdon, which became a base for photo-reconnaissance Canberras. Disaster was unavoidable when, on 3 May 1977, a returning Canberra, on its flight path over the Oxmoor housing estate, went out of control. It crashed, spreading burning fuel over a terrace of houses, killing three children and the plane’s crew of two. By not ejecting the crew gave their lives to save an adjacent school. The accident, bad as it was, had narrowly missed being much worse and led to questions of why there were flights over a housing estate and whether housing should have been built beneath an already existing flight path.

Where there are stretches of water people need to cross them. Ferries for centuries crossed East Anglia’s rivers, sometimes failing to reach the other side. There was a tragic river ferry disaster on the Cam in Cambridge in 1905, over two centuries after lives were lost on an Ouse ferry in King’s Lynn. Ferries also crossed the sea, to and from the continent, facing war and waves, and there were accidents, but it was with ROROs that a