26 November

The great(est) storm

1703 ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ begins Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘best-worst’ novel, Paul Clifford (1830). It has inspired (along with the Literary Review’s ‘Bad Sex in Fiction’ award) the most famous spoof prize in Anglo-American fiction for the worst opening paragraph of the year in new fiction.

Few actual dark and stormy nights have, however, been commemorated in fiction. An exception is the ‘Great Storm’ of 1703 – often judged to be the worst ever to hit mainland England. ‘No pen could describe it, nor tongue express it, nor thought conceive it unless by one in the extremity of it’, wrote Defoe, its most famous chronicler, in The Storm.

Gales had battered Britain from 19 November. Barometer readings had sunk below 870, and were continuing to fall. Trees, even oaks that had stood centuries, were blown over and Defoe himself nearly killed by a falling chimney in London.

The gales reached hurricane force a week later, most devastatingly on the night of the 26th. On that night not just chimneys, but whole houses were destroyed. The newly constructed wooden Eddystone lighthouse was blown away, with not a timber remaining where it had once stood. Westminster Abbey lost its lead roof, lesser churches their spires. Queen Anne and her family were obliged to cower in the cellars of St James’s Palace as the roofs above her royal head collapsed.

Bristol was flooded to a depth of three feet by water driven by the storm from the sea into the city. Some 1,500 sheep, 800 houses and many human lives were lost in the inundation. There was terrible destruction in the country’s shipyards. Defoe claimed to have seen with his own eyes 700 ships wrecked in the upper Thames estuary. Some 1,500 sailors were estimated to have perished. It was a serious loss of men and matériel – Britain was currently engaged abroad in the War of the Spanish Succession.

The queen proclaimed a national ‘day of fast’ on 19 January 1704 to commemorate the loss of life and property sustained by her realm. The Great Storm itself became folkloric and was remembered long after those, like Defoe, who had witnessed it were dead. It figures centrally in W.M. Thackeray’s ‘Queen Anne’ novel, Henry Esmond (1852). It is also the backdrop to the first ten chapters of W.H. Ainsworth’s historical bestseller, Jack Sheppard (1840). Drawing heavily on Defoe, Ainsworth paints a gothic picture of that dreadful night of Friday, 26 November 1703, from the ominous stillness of the eye of the storm to the terrible assault of its full force on London:

During the foregoing occurrences a dead calm prevailed. But as Rowland sprang to the helm … a roar like a volley of ordnance was heard aloft, and the wind again burst its bondage. A moment before, the surface of the stream was black as ink. It was now whitening, hissing, and seething like an enormous cauldron. The blast once more swept over the agitated river: whirled off the sheets of foam, scattered them far and wide in rain-drops, and left the raging torrent blacker than before. The gale had become a hurricane: that hurricane was the most terrible that ever laid waste our city. Destruction everywhere marked its course. Steeples toppled, and towers reeled beneath its fury. Trees were torn up by the roots; many houses were levelled to the ground; others were unroofed; the leads on the churches were ripped off, and ‘shrivelled up like scrolls of parchment.’ Nothing on land or water was spared by the remorseless gale. Most of the vessels lying in the river were driven from their moorings, dashed tumultuously against each other, or blown ashore. All was darkness, horror, confusion, ruin. Men fled from their tottering habitations, and returned to them scared by greater dangers. The end of the world seemed at hand.