From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Today marks the anniversary of Britain’s worst natural disaster in modern history.
There have been many films of the 1953 North Sea flood.
This one delves a bit deeper into the suffering of those affected.
I don’t think anybody alive today can have the slightest understanding of the fortitude and determination shown by people in those days, who lived through events like this flood, the winter of 1948 and the floods that followed. Not least because the country was still on its knees after the war.
Not only is this film a tribute to them, but also a reminder that, no matter the attempts by the BBC to pretend our weather is more extreme than ever before, we should all be grateful we are not living in 1953.
1947 was the really bad winter. I remember my Dad, a Yorkshireman, telling me about it. Yorkshire was one of the places worst hit.
My mother always said 1947 was worse than 63.
Did the winter of 1963 have a wider impact compared with 1947 or was it considered as bad as or worse than ‘47 because of more news coverage?
Winter 63 was cold and dry with snow laying on the ground from late December till late March , which is unheard off in the UK . Then weather did a complete change around , temperatures in the South went up to 21C and the snow melted in days causing widespread flooding .
Not “laying” but “lying” since the snow was figuratively reclining. “Lie” and “lay” are the most frequently misused verbs in the English language.
In 1947 the UK was still suffering from WW2. UK rationing was actually stricter than during the war, including meat, butter, sugar, bacon, tea, and fat. Bread was rationed until 1948.
Restricted access to tea would make anything worse for Brits!
I still have my ration book!
Not only rationing, but very high taxes. My great grandfather was paying 17 shillings on the pound. In the early 1960’s a whole lot of banks collapsed.
Damage to your country was pretty horrific. Commenter below talks about 85% taxes. An AI query about why UK taxes were so high, says they were even higher:
AI Query: When did the U.K. pay off its war debt?
The all-knowing one says that you paid off 7.5 B to the U.S. alone, on loans of 4.3 B. We charged you 2% interest.
The date of the final payout: December, 2006. A fifty year loan.
I hate interest.
Que up the Beetles “Tax Man”
The effects of the 1963 Winter were most pronounced in the West of England, an area which is normally rather milder than Yorkshire or Scotland. I don’t know how it was up there but in Bristol it was damned cold continuously for three months – and few had central-heating in those days. But we got used to it…
For lowest recorded temperatures, though, I think you have to look at the Winter of 1981 in the English Midlands, though they were much shorter-lived.
I was a grammar school pupil at the time and lived in Wallasey on the Wirral. I used to cycle the 3-4 miles to school but was unable to do that for the first 3 months of 1963 because of the snow and when the snow went it was still very cold and I had to keep going by bus for a while.
I think the freezing of the English Channel for up to a mile off-shore was for me one of the most pronounced effects.
The WORST flood in the area (Adjacent to Britain) was 6200BC when Doggerland vanished from the surface.
Are there news reports on the internet?
According to the newspapers at the time it was due to ‘climate change’. Actually, it was.
Yep, rapid sea level rise associated with Sub Arctic Ice Melt. Well after the Younger Dryas melt water pulse though.
The final straw was the Storegga undersea landslide with > 20m tsunami washed over it.
At long last, we have found an actual disaster associated with Climate Change!
Unfortunately for the Alarmists, this was 8000 years ago.
Good Doggerland podcast by Josh and Chuck os “Stuff You Should Know” a few months back. I had not heard of it.
The last British National Service personnel passed away a few years ago…I remember one man telling me he was part of a group ferried to the Netherlands to assist in the rescues and reclamation…
My modest proposal is that the UK was in a
Rationing more severe than in WW2 in 1947
There was a storm in 1953 so climate change isn’t happening!
Was it worse than any current “crisis”?
If the UK went net-zero tomorrow would that fix climate change and we could expect more ideal weather the day after?
You insist climate change is the problem and so we need a timeline on how soon after we act we can expect to see improvement to the ideal weather?
If things happened before, when they happen now, they are not unprecedented or evidence of extraordinary change. Climate change is always happening. Always has and probably always will. Short attention spans and dogmatic beliefs tend to inspire false perception.
A good read on what the past was like is Brian Fagan’s “The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850”. If, in fact, adding a little CO2 did help to usher that period out, then we can be grateful. However, the welcome warming began well before that most remarkable of trace gases was much enriched by human endeavor.
It is available as a documentary on YouTube. Watched it years ago. Very interesting.
“A good read” Ditto also his ‘The Great Warming’ and ‘The Complete Ice Age’
There was a worse one in 1703 watch and learn
https://youtu.be/tccWmr9bZYA?si=Deg7JoxxbAGMrkxn
It is not a question of if the climate is changing. It is, moment by moment, year by year.
The question is, is human emitted CO2 causing catastrophic climate change? No. It is not.
Only a cretin like you thinks us sceptics deny the reality of CC. We just know that it has absolutely nothing to do with anthropogenic CO2.
That same storm and the storm surge caused havoc on the other side of the North Sea in The Low Countries. Widespread flooding, over 1500 people lost their lives. The disaster led to the ‘Delta Works’, a 40 year project, started in 1954 with the last element finished in 1997, to protect the Rhine-Meuse-Schelt delta on which much of the Netherlands sits.
https://www.ice.org.uk/what-is-civil-engineering/infrastructure-projects/delta-works
https://www.holland.com/global/tourism/getting-around/interests/land-of-water/delta-works
The ‘delta norm’ for levees is 7 meter in the North of the country. Compare with the levees at New York (4 meter) or lake Pontrachain (5 meters?). Just saying …
The Thames barrier was planned as a result of the 1953 event to protect central London from flooding.
If you’re going to drag that up, might as well mention the Bristol Channel floods 30 January 1607, some say it was a tsunami, but records from all over indicate it was most likely climate change, sorry, weather.
Or was it the Severn bore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severn_bore on steroids?
“The Severn bore is a tidal bore seen on the tidal reaches of the River Severn in south western England.”
“A tidal bore is a tidal phenomenon in which the leading edge of the incoming tide forms a wave (or waves) of water that travels up a river or narrow bay, reversing the direction of the river or bay’s current.
No really, it’s only on the news every year with surfers etc.; nothing to do with this.
A lot of people reading wuwt are americans like me. Our news shows are mostly middle-aged female plastic surgery victims reading repetitive scripts about how everything is awful and it’s the president’s fault. Until this morning I did not know what a tidal bore was – so I posted in case anyone else was curious.
You must be watching CNN.
Doing that too long will warp one’s mind.
RE: tidal bores… And lest we think that these storms, like the so-called “atmospheric rivers” are new phenomena:
(Matthew Paris Diary, October 1250)
No reliable reports exist of the total death toll from this particular flood in early 13th Century other than one village where several hundred died. And the references to Holland and the lowlands citing hundreds of thousands of deaths in that period, Frisia torn apart and relocated.
The Worst Flood in 20th-century British History was in 1953. About 0.0006% of the UK population was killed.
But …
The Worst Flood in ‘Recorded British History’ was in 1607. About 0.05% of the UK population was killed.
The flood struck on Tuesday, January 30 1607 ( or January 20 1606, according to the old Julian calendar, which was still in use at that time) in the morning. The flood affected coastal communities across South Wales, Gloucestershire, Devon, & Somerset; it went 14 miles inland.
As in 1953, ~2,000 people were killed.
Good description here …
https://martinpollins.com/2025/01/20/britains-killer-flood-of-1607/
In 1953 at Barling Magna, Essex, A relative of my first wife was found the following day standing naked in the kitchen sink; the rest of the house & his family were swept away. He was so traumatised that he was committed to a mental institute.
And think about it: The People had no warning this was coming. Very little coverage of the weather in 1953.
I disagree.
We had black & white tv in 1958, but the weather reports just consisted of a lot of squiggly lines, arrows and numbers on the b&w screen.
Oh, and some nerdy bloke with glasses and a bow tie looking at the chart and paying homage to it like it was the Magna Carta, and then pointing at bits of it occasionally.
Not nearly the “shock-and-awe” productions in technicolor, cinemascope, dancing girls, hellfire sermons and fire-works that present as weather reports on the telly these days.
“I disagree.
We had black & white tv in 1958.”
Good, but not a lot of use in 1953
Lloyds of London the insurers hold weather records going back hundreds of years , a few hundred years ago the was an incredibly violent storm and sea water got several miles in land . The policy wording at the time used to refer to damage by storm flood or tempest
Seems like a really bad flood.
This BBC article is slightly less blatant than the news where they were claiming the residents of Clydach Terrace are the first UK resettlements caused by climate change.
Complete tosh of course, always flooded badly, people are just less willing to accept it these days with houses full of costly stuff rather than a stone floor and a few wooden tables and chairs. It’s ridiculously expensive/impossible to prevent, so the council took the easy option.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgl62rx6l2o
“Clydach Terrace lies on the natural floodplain in a very constrained section of the valley and has historically suffered from severe flooding.
The community has a unique flood risk due to its position. When it floods, it does so quickly and to a great depth, which means there is a risk to life.
There are currently no flood defences in Ynysybwl, although we carry out regular maintenance work to manage the flood risk.”
The flood came within 200 yds of our house. A raised railway embankment saved us. I was 7 years old.
“I don’t think anybody alive today can have the slightest understanding of the fortitude and determination shown by people in those days, who lived through events like this flood”
Doesn’t matter if 1,000,000 houses get washed away or just 1 house gets washed away. If it’s my house I will experience the slightest understanding.
I lived through that 1953 storm, I lived in Yorkshire. I remember the wall to wall fitted carpet in the dining room being lifted up several inches off the plank flooring. The crawl space of the house had ventilation bricks and the wind literally pressurized the crawl space, I watched in awe as our next door neighbour’s garage was first levitated in one piece, before flying into our garden where it spontaneously disassembled itself into component parts before touchdown.
I don’t remember 1947 I was two years old that year.
I can just imagine if this flood had occurred today how much figurative hemorrhaging outfits like the BBC, The Guardian and the rest of Britain’s domestic rags plus their overseas counterparts would be undergoing. To them such an event would have been a godsend because they would claim it to be irrefutable proof of manmade climate change driven of course by excessive fossil fuel consumption. The solution: higher carbon taxes and fuel prices plus major restrictions on air travel, red meat consumption, and more EV and heat pump mandates; otherwise not just Britain but all of humankind was guaranteed to be doomed, once and for all.
It’s a different type of disaster nowadays-
(700) The REAL Reason The UK Is Quickly Falling Apart – YouTube