First of February 1953 The day Erith and Belvedere flooded.
In 1953 more than 300 people died in flooding in Kent, Essex and East Anglia.
On the night of Saturday 31 January 1953 and the morning of 1 February 1953, the North Sea was experiencing spring tides.
A deep Atlantic depression passed to the north of Scotland and moved south east down the North Sea.
The northerly gales on the western side of this depression forced sea water south at the time of high tide, causing a tidal surge down the North Sea which locally exceeded 5.6m (18.4 ft) above mean sea level.
The winds also generated very large waves in the North Sea that damaged coastal defences.
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Although only one of the 300 lives lost was local, hundreds of people lost their homes and all their possessions. The East Coast floods of February 1953 saw the worst floods in living memories. The low-lying north of the borough adjacent to the River Thames saw widespread flooding along the river frontage in Erith and Belvedere marsh.
The Thames breaches its bank near the Callender Cable Company’s jetty in Erith when the sea bank collapsed and Callender’s and other factories were badly flooded. Huge holes had been torn in the Erith sea wall the size of a London double decker bus. A new sea wall, four feet above the 1953 tide level, was later built.
Sunday 1st February 1953, the River Thames burst its banks at Belvedere. It was at 2 o’clock in the morning that water started to flow over to sweep across the flood plain that comprised the marshes.
By the time of high tide, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, “over four hundred people, in Belvedere alone, were left homeless. Most of these were accommodated in church halls – St Augustine’s, Belvedere Methodist, St John’s, West Street, Erith and St. Mary’s, Abbey Wood – but a group of Travellers managed to pull their homes from the encampment and took refuge at Lodge-Hill hutments at East Wickham.”
Local historian John Prichard commented: “The whole of the marsh area went under water, which extended far enough to cut the railway line at Belvedere Station and flood Picardy Street.”
History Washed Away
Janet Keet-Black of the Romany and Traveller Family History Society notes there are records of similar floods, one in 1928, when the Thames burst its banks upstream in London and 14 people drowned, and centuries earlier in 1527, when the area underwater was not finally reclaimed for sixty years.
“These floods “ commented John Prichard, “hastened the end of the extensive gipsy encampment which had been a feature of the marshes for over a century.”
During the early 1950s there were an estimated 600 people permanently on Belvedere Marsh rising to about 1700 over winter.
“We all had to run for our lives because we were only about three or four hundred yards away from the River Thames.” recalls Betsy Stanley, who lived on the marshes in the Travellers settlement. “I think it happened at two or three o’clock in the morning. We went over to a bit of a bank and saw all the water coming over, and it was just creeping up, but by the time it came over we were all going up the road. We had got dressed and were running as the water came up over the bank.
It really came quickly.”
Queen Elizabeth visited the flooded area on Friday 13 February 1953.” A visit captured in the photograph of the Queen shaking hands with Mr Spauls “caught coatless” in Crabtree Manor Way pictured in “A View from the River”. Popular Kent historian Bob Ogley wrote of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Gravesend, Erith and Belvedere in a newspaper series on the great floods of 1953, retelling of her visit to a rest centre in West Street where 73 refugees from the floods were accommodated.
“From them the Queen learned at first hand of the courage and spirit of the people of Erith and Belvedere who had lost their homes.
She chattered to a small boy, Barry Staggs, of Norman Road, Belvedere who had been rescued from seven feet of flood water. He told her he wanted to go home again.
The Queen also visited the civic restaurant in Corinthian Road and drove to Crabtree Manor Way, Belvedere; one of the worst hit streets in the area.
At number 5 she talked to Mr and Mrs Angus Stevens who invited her to play the piano. She did.
No sound came apart from the gurgle of flood water.”
The Thames breaches its bank near the Callender Cable Company’s jetty in Erith when the sea bank collapsed and Callender’s and other factories were badly flooded. Huge holes had been torn in the Erith sea wall the size of a London double decker bus. A new sea wall, four feet above the 1953 tide level, was later built.
Sunday 1st February 1953, the River Thames burst its banks at Belvedere. It was at 2 o’clock in the morning that water started to flow over to sweep across the flood plain that comprised the marshes.
By the time of high tide, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, “over four hundred people, in Belvedere alone, were left homeless. Most of these were accommodated in church halls – St Augustine’s, Belvedere Methodist, St John’s, West Street, Erith and St. Mary’s, Abbey Wood – but a group of Travellers managed to pull their homes from the encampment and took refuge at Lodge-Hill hutments at East Wickham.”
Local historian John Prichard commented: “The whole of the marsh area went under water, which extended far enough to cut the railway line at Belvedere Station and flood Picardy Street.”
History Washed Away
Janet Keet-Black of the Romany and Traveller Family History Society notes there are records of similar floods, one in 1928, when the Thames burst its banks upstream in London and 14 people drowned, and centuries earlier in 1527, when the area underwater was not finally reclaimed for sixty years.
“These floods “ commented John Prichard, “hastened the end of the extensive gipsy encampment which had been a feature of the marshes for over a century.”
During the early 1950s there were an estimated 600 people permanently on Belvedere Marsh rising to about 1700 over winter.
“We all had to run for our lives because we were only about three or four hundred yards away from the River Thames.” recalls Betsy Stanley, who lived on the marshes in the Travellers settlement. “I think it happened at two or three o’clock in the morning. We went over to a bit of a bank and saw all the water coming over, and it was just creeping up, but by the time it came over we were all going up the road. We had got dressed and were running as the water came up over the bank.
It really came quickly.”
Queen Elizabeth visited the flooded area on Friday 13 February 1953.” A visit captured in the photograph of the Queen shaking hands with Mr Spauls “caught coatless” in Crabtree Manor Way pictured in “A View from the River”. Popular Kent historian Bob Ogley wrote of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Gravesend, Erith and Belvedere in a newspaper series on the great floods of 1953, retelling of her visit to a rest centre in West Street where 73 refugees from the floods were accommodated.
“From them the Queen learned at first hand of the courage and spirit of the people of Erith and Belvedere who had lost their homes.
She chattered to a small boy, Barry Staggs, of Norman Road, Belvedere who had been rescued from seven feet of flood water. He told her he wanted to go home again.
The Queen also visited the civic restaurant in Corinthian Road and drove to Crabtree Manor Way, Belvedere; one of the worst hit streets in the area.
At number 5 she talked to Mr and Mrs Angus Stevens who invited her to play the piano. She did.
No sound came apart from the gurgle of flood water.”
Trolley Bus Route 698 and Belvedere Football Club
Picture Source: Toby & John King’s website: www.transporthistory.co.uk
Under several feet of water behind the trolley bus lies Park View, home of the ‘Deres’, Erith and Belvedere football Club. (It is now the site of a B&Q Superstore). The trolley bus has either been driven through the water as it passed Belvedere Station, which was level with the fields, or was terminated here to return to Bexleyheath.
Erith and Belvedere had lost, in gale-force conditions, a home match to Worthing on the Saturday afternoon. That night the ground was engulfed in flood water. Local fan Brian Spurrell recalled:
“By morning, 400 families were homeless and rescue services were rowing between lamp posts of Crabtree Manorway. Erith and Belvedere’s football ground, Park View, was under water. In fact, at its height, the flood water nearly submerged the crossbars and reached the top step of the Belvedere Hotel.”
By the end of February the flood water had receded and football resumed at Park View on March 14 against Epsom. The Travellers’ fare less well as Betsy Stanley remembered: “ it was after the flood and we must have been living at Picardy School for about six weeks – everybody was fed up and just wanted to get home. When the flood waters went down, the Council sent the big lorries round with big tanks on the back of them, with big sort of round hose pipes and warm air came through them, and they put those in the huts to dry them off. When they were all dry, me and my father and my sister Olive, we went over there and it took us three days to get rid of the mud that was left behind.”
The community did not resettle the area. The local council had had regular discussions on the eviction of the encampment. There had been a slow clearing of the land through land purchase since the early 1940s with re-housing reducing the numbers camped on the marsh. By the time of the flood there were still 73 families resident. But afterwards the marshes use as a home to hundreds of Travellers for over a century ended.
Disaster of floods marked
In February 2003, a ceremony marking 50 years since the disastrous London floods took place at the Thames barrier where a plaque was unveiled by the Environment Agency and the Royal Dutch Ambassador.
More than 2,100 people died in the UK, The Netherlands and neighbouring North Sea countries in what has been described as the UK's worst peacetime disaster.
The floods led to the construction of the Thames Barrier which is built upstream of the Marsh. The event also marked the first time the Thames Barrier was operated 20 years ago. But the threat remains.
The Environmental Agency’s warning that flood defences need to be improved if there is development in the Thames flood plain has led to dispute on who would foot the bill. Bexley Council argues: “If a developer were to build in the area they would have to account for natural drainage. The cost of any extra flood defence, would have to be met by the developer, not the council."
Others disagree: the Thamesway Gateway London Partnership and Environment Agency take the position that developers should not expect to pay for capital flood defence projects as it would harm the quality of developments or the amount of affordable housing being built in the flood plain developments.
Why was there no warning?
In 1953 there were no satellites or computers to make an accurate forecast, and there was no single body responsible for flood warnings.
While communities did have emergency plans, many telephone lines had been brought down by the gales and affected by the flooding, so large scale evacuations were not possible.
Virtually no warning of the impending disaster was passed to the southerly counties until it was too late.
Time table of Weather Events
On the night of 31 January 1953, the East Coast of England suffered one of the worst floods in living memory and one of the biggest environmental disasters ever to have occurred in this country.
From 1800 on 31st January, winds drove the storm surge southwards causing devastating floods along the east coast reaching Canvey Island just after midnight on 1st February then continued around the North Sea basin to devastate the Netherlands. Hurricane force winds were recorded at Felixstowe at 2000.
The first event of January 31 was when the Fleetwood trawler, Michael Griffiths, sank off the Hebrides in the early hours without trace.
At 1.45 pm the Princess Victoria was abandoned off Belfast and another 132 died.
At 5 pm the first sea walls on the Lincolnshire coast gave way and waves over 6 metres high (20ft) crashed onto homes, drowning 41 people. The tide, continuously getting higher and higher, ran down the East Coast. In the Wash, King's Lynn lost 15 people, and a few miles round the coast, in the small village of Heacham, 66 lost their lives.
As the night wore on every coastal town and community on the East Coast was battered by the storm. In total there were breaches in the sea defences in 1,200 places, and thousands of animals were drowned.
There was no flood warning system and the first most people knew about their danger was when water several feet deep crashed into their homes. In a single night in the South and East 24,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. Canvey Island on the Thames Estuary was the last to be hit in the early hours of February 1, with 58 people being drowned. In London the water lapped the top of the embankments in Victoria and Chelsea. If the defences had been breached the tube would have been submerged too.
In total, 307 people in the UK were killed and almost 100,000 hectares of eastern England were flooded, while in the Netherlands, 50 dykes burst and 1,800 people drowned.
The sea reclaimed over 200,000 hectares of polder country.
Throughout the evening, freak winds and a swelling tide pushed the sea to dangerous levels. Flood defences were breached by huge waves and coastal towns in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent were devastated as sea water rushed into the streets.
Over 300 people lost their lives and over 24,000 houses were flooded. Around 40,000 people were evacuated from their homes. Many of these had to sit the freezing cold night out on their rooftops, awaiting rescue by fire brigades, the police, military personnel and the RNLI. The subsequent clean up operations took weeks to complete at a huge cost.
It took nine months to drain all the flood water and make temporary repairs to the sea walls. In typical British fashion a committee was set up to consider flood defences, particularly in London. As a result, 30 years later, the Thames Barrier was built.
An eyewitness to the flooding of the marshes was Walter Brooke he had been awarded a British Empire Medal (BEM) for risking his life to help others during the flood. During a reminiscence event fifty years later, (now aged 82 and still living in Belvedere) he spoke of his experiences to Kentish Times reporter, Sara Case:
“It was a Saturday night and I had been out dancing. When I got home to our house in Crabtree Manorway, which is right next to the Thames, my sister asked me what was happening outside.
I went out on my bike and discovered flood warnings had been given, so I cycled off to let people living in cottages further down our road know.
A bank broke right in front of me and freezing cold water was around my ankles, but I carried on and spread the word.”
Mr Brookes came across an elderly night watchman on his travels and told him to take refuge at his family home.
He did this, but when Mr Brookes returned to his house later he was surprised to find the man had left to check up on something, and went searching for him.
Sadly he found him lying in the water dead and thinks he may have had a heart attack.
Along with a neighbour, Mr Brooks tried to revive him, but without success.
He said: “It was terrifying, the water was waist deep in parts and it was unbelievably icy cold.
I was knocked off my bike at one point by floating petrol drums and only recovered it two weeks later. “
Picture Source: Toby & John King’s website: www.transporthistory.co.uk
Under several feet of water behind the trolley bus lies Park View, home of the ‘Deres’, Erith and Belvedere football Club. (It is now the site of a B&Q Superstore). The trolley bus has either been driven through the water as it passed Belvedere Station, which was level with the fields, or was terminated here to return to Bexleyheath.
Erith and Belvedere had lost, in gale-force conditions, a home match to Worthing on the Saturday afternoon. That night the ground was engulfed in flood water. Local fan Brian Spurrell recalled:
“By morning, 400 families were homeless and rescue services were rowing between lamp posts of Crabtree Manorway. Erith and Belvedere’s football ground, Park View, was under water. In fact, at its height, the flood water nearly submerged the crossbars and reached the top step of the Belvedere Hotel.”
By the end of February the flood water had receded and football resumed at Park View on March 14 against Epsom. The Travellers’ fare less well as Betsy Stanley remembered: “ it was after the flood and we must have been living at Picardy School for about six weeks – everybody was fed up and just wanted to get home. When the flood waters went down, the Council sent the big lorries round with big tanks on the back of them, with big sort of round hose pipes and warm air came through them, and they put those in the huts to dry them off. When they were all dry, me and my father and my sister Olive, we went over there and it took us three days to get rid of the mud that was left behind.”
The community did not resettle the area. The local council had had regular discussions on the eviction of the encampment. There had been a slow clearing of the land through land purchase since the early 1940s with re-housing reducing the numbers camped on the marsh. By the time of the flood there were still 73 families resident. But afterwards the marshes use as a home to hundreds of Travellers for over a century ended.
Disaster of floods marked
In February 2003, a ceremony marking 50 years since the disastrous London floods took place at the Thames barrier where a plaque was unveiled by the Environment Agency and the Royal Dutch Ambassador.
More than 2,100 people died in the UK, The Netherlands and neighbouring North Sea countries in what has been described as the UK's worst peacetime disaster.
The floods led to the construction of the Thames Barrier which is built upstream of the Marsh. The event also marked the first time the Thames Barrier was operated 20 years ago. But the threat remains.
The Environmental Agency’s warning that flood defences need to be improved if there is development in the Thames flood plain has led to dispute on who would foot the bill. Bexley Council argues: “If a developer were to build in the area they would have to account for natural drainage. The cost of any extra flood defence, would have to be met by the developer, not the council."
Others disagree: the Thamesway Gateway London Partnership and Environment Agency take the position that developers should not expect to pay for capital flood defence projects as it would harm the quality of developments or the amount of affordable housing being built in the flood plain developments.
Why was there no warning?
In 1953 there were no satellites or computers to make an accurate forecast, and there was no single body responsible for flood warnings.
While communities did have emergency plans, many telephone lines had been brought down by the gales and affected by the flooding, so large scale evacuations were not possible.
Virtually no warning of the impending disaster was passed to the southerly counties until it was too late.
Time table of Weather Events
On the night of 31 January 1953, the East Coast of England suffered one of the worst floods in living memory and one of the biggest environmental disasters ever to have occurred in this country.
From 1800 on 31st January, winds drove the storm surge southwards causing devastating floods along the east coast reaching Canvey Island just after midnight on 1st February then continued around the North Sea basin to devastate the Netherlands. Hurricane force winds were recorded at Felixstowe at 2000.
The first event of January 31 was when the Fleetwood trawler, Michael Griffiths, sank off the Hebrides in the early hours without trace.
At 1.45 pm the Princess Victoria was abandoned off Belfast and another 132 died.
At 5 pm the first sea walls on the Lincolnshire coast gave way and waves over 6 metres high (20ft) crashed onto homes, drowning 41 people. The tide, continuously getting higher and higher, ran down the East Coast. In the Wash, King's Lynn lost 15 people, and a few miles round the coast, in the small village of Heacham, 66 lost their lives.
As the night wore on every coastal town and community on the East Coast was battered by the storm. In total there were breaches in the sea defences in 1,200 places, and thousands of animals were drowned.
There was no flood warning system and the first most people knew about their danger was when water several feet deep crashed into their homes. In a single night in the South and East 24,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. Canvey Island on the Thames Estuary was the last to be hit in the early hours of February 1, with 58 people being drowned. In London the water lapped the top of the embankments in Victoria and Chelsea. If the defences had been breached the tube would have been submerged too.
In total, 307 people in the UK were killed and almost 100,000 hectares of eastern England were flooded, while in the Netherlands, 50 dykes burst and 1,800 people drowned.
The sea reclaimed over 200,000 hectares of polder country.
Throughout the evening, freak winds and a swelling tide pushed the sea to dangerous levels. Flood defences were breached by huge waves and coastal towns in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent were devastated as sea water rushed into the streets.
Over 300 people lost their lives and over 24,000 houses were flooded. Around 40,000 people were evacuated from their homes. Many of these had to sit the freezing cold night out on their rooftops, awaiting rescue by fire brigades, the police, military personnel and the RNLI. The subsequent clean up operations took weeks to complete at a huge cost.
It took nine months to drain all the flood water and make temporary repairs to the sea walls. In typical British fashion a committee was set up to consider flood defences, particularly in London. As a result, 30 years later, the Thames Barrier was built.
An eyewitness to the flooding of the marshes was Walter Brooke he had been awarded a British Empire Medal (BEM) for risking his life to help others during the flood. During a reminiscence event fifty years later, (now aged 82 and still living in Belvedere) he spoke of his experiences to Kentish Times reporter, Sara Case:
“It was a Saturday night and I had been out dancing. When I got home to our house in Crabtree Manorway, which is right next to the Thames, my sister asked me what was happening outside.
I went out on my bike and discovered flood warnings had been given, so I cycled off to let people living in cottages further down our road know.
A bank broke right in front of me and freezing cold water was around my ankles, but I carried on and spread the word.”
Mr Brookes came across an elderly night watchman on his travels and told him to take refuge at his family home.
He did this, but when Mr Brookes returned to his house later he was surprised to find the man had left to check up on something, and went searching for him.
Sadly he found him lying in the water dead and thinks he may have had a heart attack.
Along with a neighbour, Mr Brooks tried to revive him, but without success.
He said: “It was terrifying, the water was waist deep in parts and it was unbelievably icy cold.
I was knocked off my bike at one point by floating petrol drums and only recovered it two weeks later. “