The drowned world

Fifty years ago next week, eastern Britain was struck by a flood bigger than any in its history. More than 300 people died. Michael McCarthy speaks to one of the survivors about his experience that night and asks, could it happen again?

Kathleen Arthur heard the noise some time after one o'clock in the morning. It was unlike any noise she had heard before, and it made her uneasy. The wind had been howling all day and into the night – the storm was a huge one, lashing all Britain – but this wasn't the wind. It was deep and powerful and ominous, and it was coming closer.

She went into the other bedroom of her small bungalow, which sat with a few more at Seawick in the middle of St Osyth marsh on the Essex coast, and woke her 23-year-old son, Reg. Her pet name for him was Bubble. She said: "Bubble, there's a strange roaring sound."

Reg Arthur slipped his clothes on and looked out the window. Water was rushing through the garden, like a river. They were being flooded. This was unfortunate, but perhaps – it initially seemed to Reg – not a critical situation. The Arthurs had suffered floods twice before on the marsh, and these had been a matter of a few inches: the bungalow was raised above ground level so water would not come in. Reg splashed out into the garden and brought the chickens inside the house, for safety.

But this flood was different. A few seconds later, the water did come in. It came in under the door and started to rise. It rose to ankle height. Then it rose to knee height. Then it rose to waist height. It was still rising rapidly. The Arthurs were in a bungalow. There was no upstairs...

That night, the night of Saturday 31 January and Sunday 1 February 1953, thousands of people suddenly found themselves in this situation, all down the east coast of England. They too were peacefully at home, unaware of any danger, and then they too caught the strange roaring sound, which, for not a few of them, was the last sound they heard. It was the noise of the North Sea invading the land.

Fifty years ago next week, Britain's sea defences comprehensively gave way when a storm surge, a rare but terrifying weather phenomenon, hit 1,000 miles of coastline. Piled up to an unprecedented height by a chance combination of meteorological circumstances, driven by a gale of exceptional power, the sea burst through coastal barriers in no fewer than 1,200 places from Lincolnshire all the way to the outskirts of London, from Mablethorpe in the north to Canvey Island in the south. And, when morning came, 307 people were dead.

There had been nothing like it before, certainly not in living memory, perhaps not even in the written record. The great east-coast flood was probably the worst national peacetime disaster to hit the UK. Nearly 200,000 acres were inundated; 32,000 people were evacuated from flooded homes; two large and many small power stations were put out of action; 100 miles of road and 200 miles of railway were made impassable; and 46,000 head of livestock were lost. The damage, estimated at £50m in 1953 prices, would be many billions today. But it was the human cost that left the nation stunned.

Mass drowning, on land, isn't... British, somehow. It is not a disaster to which our national psyche is accustomed. Gas explosions, yes; big fires, yes; train crashes, definitely: but death by water for so many, in the middle of a freezing winter night, seemed particularly horrific. For those who lived through it, the 1953 flood was an event engraved on their memories for the rest of their lives. For us today, increasingly threatened by flooding because of climate change, it has important lessons still.

It has to be admitted that the circumstances that gave rise to the 1953 floods were unusual. It was the chance coming-together of four factors at precisely the wrong moment: a strong north-westerly gale; a very deep area of low pressure; a big spring tide; and the topography of the North Sea, which gets narrower and shallower towards the south. The result: the storm surge, a tremendous piling up of water in the North Sea's southern end, which produced a sea level eight or nine feet higher than the highest normal tides.

The gale was a huge one. It was first located out in the Atlantic, a thousand miles to the west of Ireland, on Thursday 29 January, and it then rushed towards the Hebrides and northern Scotland, where by the Saturday it was at its height, with winds of 125mph recorded on the Orkneys.

At lunchtime that day it caused its first disaster, the sinking of a passenger ferry in the Irish Sea. It is a measure of how much the subsequent flood caught the country's imagination that it largely eclipsed the loss of the Princess Victoria, which would otherwise have been the most significant national tragedy of 1953. Bound from Stranraer in Scotland to Larne in Northern Ireland, she was overwhelmed by mountainous seas and went down before help could reach her, with the loss of 132 passengers and crew.

But the storm was only beginning the trouble it was to cause. On the Saturday afternoon its centre moved round the top of Scotland and it began to blow from the north-west down the North Sea's entire length. At its heart was a very deep depression – below 970 millibars – and this very low air pressure itself caused the sea level to rise, by perhaps as much as two feet. The tide due that afternoon was a spring tide, so it was already likely to be high; the depression made it unusually so.

Both these factors were reinforced by the gale, building up huge waves over the long "fetch" of the sea. The flood tide was piled up in its southward flow down the east coast, and as it reached the North Sea's shallower and narrower end, it simply rose and rose and rose. The storm surge was born, three feet, then six feet, then nine feet, swamping, overtopping and destroying the coastal defences in its path.

Sometime after 1am it broke through the earth sea-wall on the western end of St Osyth marsh, the great three-mile long flatland to the west of Clacton. The effect was like a dam bursting: the amount of water that poured through was later estimated by the Clacton borough engineer at 2 billion gallons. Channelled by the higher ground to the north and the southern sea-wall to the south, driven on by the wind, the North Sea roared directly eastwards over the marshland like a tidal wave, covering it to a depth of up to 10 feet.

As it rushed into the bungalow at Seawick, Reg Arthur realised that he and his mother had one chance: the roof space. There was a hatch in the kitchen ceiling just big enough to squeeze through, so they pushed a table underneath it and frantically hauled themselves up, Kathleen Arthur first, then her son, bringing with him the family cats (he had to leave the chickens behind).

There was no floor, so they sat on the joists as the water continued to rise, shattering the glass in the front door and moving the furniture around; they could hear the piano bumping against the walls. The water rose and rose, a horrible end coming up inexorably towards them as they crouched helplessly in the confinement of their pitch-black cell. But it stopped, just in time. It had reached the top of the doors, above where their heads would have been had they remained below. They sat huddled inside the dark roof, shivering, shocked, with death just a few inches underneath them.

They were the lucky ones. The tidal wave of water had rushed on across the marsh, and after another mile it hit Jaywick, Clacton's western suburb. Jaywick is a strange place, even today, consisting largely of small, timber-framed, pebbledashed chalet bungalows that were built as holiday homes and have gradually become converted into permanent dwellings, in many cases for people who have retired. They have an air of fragility about them, but they sit inside a substantial concrete sea-wall to the south, which seems to offer real protection.

But that night, the North Sea wasn't coming over that sea wall, which indeed had held. It was coming three miles across St Osyth marsh from the west, and when at about 1.30am it slammed into Meadow Way, the road that bordered the marshland – as it still does – there was no protection at all.

Most of the 700 people who were in Jaywick's bungalows that night were elderly and asleep. There had been no warning; perhaps they were tucked up cosily, perhaps they were dreaming. They were certainly not expectingany danger when the sea suddenly cascaded through doors and windows into their bedrooms. Today Meadow Way looks like any other suburban street, but it does not take much imagination to picture the horror of it for the old people taken by surprise in their sheets and blankets, in their pyjamas and dressing-gowns, in the gurgling dark of that freezing winter night.

Casualty figures are statistics; let these people briefly be remembered as individuals. James and Mary Ketley, aged 74 and 68, were at No 3, Meadow Way. Emma Scott, 78, was at No 11. Herbert Law, 76, and his sister Margarita Law, 74, were at No 21, while Helena Bayle, 62, was at No 22. Nellie Burnett, 87, was at No 87. Lavinia Lambert, 71, and Florence Weatherburn, 69, were at No 95. Harriet Fox, 74, was at No 198. Maude Ryan, 69, was at No 202. No 278 contained James William Jew and Esther Jew, aged 86 and 89, and their visitors James Charles Jew, 60, and Sarah Dempster, 61, from Wood Green in London. All died.

By the time the North Sea had finished with Jaywick, 35 people had drowned. There were higher death tolls that night: 41 on the Lincolnshire coast, 66 at Heacham and Hunstanton in Norfolk, 40 at Felixstowe in Suffolk, 58 at Canvey Island in the Thames estuary. But proportionately, Jaywick suffered most: 5 per cent of its population lost their lives. The other 95 per cent were homeless. (And the storm surge had still not finished its work: across the North Sea, it built up even higher, claiming 1,800 lives in the Netherlands.)

Back in the bungalow at Seawick, Reg Arthur was battering a hole in the gable end of the roof. Eventually he peered out at a vast lake, lit by bright moonlight – the full moon had brought the spring tide – and the first thing he saw was a haystack, sailing past. Then he saw a bungalow floating away. He wondered if his would be next, but the foundations held. He feared another tidal surge, but none came. At midday the next day, a boat came, and he and his mother clambered out through the hole to be rescued, frozen, exhausted and thankful. (The cats made it, too; the chickens didn't.)

He is 73 now, retired in St Osyth after a career as a nature-reserve warden, mainly in Wales. He is a naturally cheerful man, but he is under no illusions about the narrowness of his escape that night. "We were incredibly lucky," he says. "At its peak the flood was very close to us, sitting in the loft. When you think what might have happened if we hadn't woken up in time... think what happened to Jaywick."

Looking back, he says, the most remarkable aspect of the disaster, apart from the scale of the flood itself, was the complete absence of any warning, although the sea's invasion had begun further up the coast in Lincolnshire, many hours before, and had successively swept on to the coasts of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. And it is true that the lack of warning was lamentable. In those days flood safety was the responsibility of individual river boards, who scarcely communicated; but the county police forces might have told each other much more than they did that night.

Things are very different now. There is a national flood warning system operated by the Environment Agency, and a storm-tide forecasting service from the Met Office, giving 24 hours' notice of surges. Flood defences have been strengthened everywhere: the sea wall that gave way on St Osyth marsh, for example, has been raised and widened. The Essex coast is now ready, the Environment Agency says, for a flood that would occur once in 1,000 years.

But the times are not propitious. The seas around south-east England are swelling as the land subsides and the sea level rises because of global warming, and climate change is likely to intensify sea storms. The combination of gale, tide, low pressure and location that arose 50 years ago might recur in an even worse form. The tide of that night could well have been higher even then, and the surge could have coincided more closely with its highest point.

Reg Arthur takes pronouncements that the great east-coast flood was a one-off with a large pinch of salt. "The same thing could easily happen again," he says. "Near here, at Wivenhoe, there's a new tidal barrier that's been put in on the river Colne to protect Colchester. We were told it would be closed twice a year. It's already being closed once a month.

"The sea can still surprise us. They say it'll be 1,000 years before we get another flood like 1953. But it won't be, will it?"