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The stormy weather we’ve been having in southern England over the past week or two prompted my friend Philip to suggest that a good post for this site would be about the Great Storm of 1987, so a big “Cheers” to him for the inspiration today.
During the night of October 15th 1987 the southern part of England was hit by the worst storm in over 250 years. By the time the storm dissipated the following day it had left a trail of destruction across the country, killing at least 18 people. The storms also ravaged France, adding a further four people to the death toll.
The thing about this particular storm is that it took the country completely by surprise, as the weather forecasters predicted that the storm would die out before it reached the UK. Rumours of a storm brewing did get started some how, prompting one woman to make weather man Michael Fish look a little foolish after the event. “A woman rang to say she’d heard there was a hurricane on the way.“, Mr. Fish almost mockingly said. “Don’t worry, there isn’t“, he went on.
To be fair to Michael, he was sort of correct. Whilst the winds generated by the storm had the speed normally associated with a hurricane, the storm couldn’t actually be classed as a hurricane because it didn’t bring enough rain with it, and the wind profile of a hurricane is also very different, having a much larger whirling effect associated with it.
When anyone who experienced this storm thinks back about it the first thing that will normally spring to mind is the sheer number of trees that were uprooted and blown down by the weather. Estimates suggest around 15 million trees were affected, with six of the most famous of these being the oak trees of Sevenoaks in Kent. Sevenoaks is a smallish commuter town, and in it’s Knole Park region there were seven large oak trees which were planted in 1902. On October 16th 1987 only one remained standing.
The day after the storm the country ground to a halt as roads and rail lines were blocked by fallen trees, and the TV news was full of pictures of houses and cars that had been unfortunate enough to have a tree land on them. The storms even affected BBC Television Centre, and that mornings Breakfast Time show had to be broadcast from an emergency location.
The storm was declared by the Met Office as a freak occurrence, something that only happens on a frequency measured in hundreds of years, so everyone was even more surprised when just three years later, in January 1990, another storm hit which was of comparable force to the 1987 Great Storm.
This storm had a similar effect on the country, and was almost the cause of the cancellation of BBC sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo, as one of the more famous casualties of this storm was Gordon Kaye, who played Rene in the show. He was hit in the forehead by a piece of an advertising hoarding, and was lucky to survive.
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I can remember waking up in the night as the wind was howling round the house….. the next morning there was no power, I didn’t bother going in for my paper round, trees everywhere along Ham Common (beyond where the Chinese is) as I walked into school…. and being told school was closed, turning round and going back home. In those days school *never* closed.
In 1990 I was trying to get from Kingston to Sunbury to get a pair of boots fitted…… after half an hour in the cold outside Bentalls waiting for a 216 I gave up and went home !
BTW I was awake at 12:30 on Monday night and could hear the wind going round the house here in Swindon (we’re on a hill to the North of the town). Here we go again I Thought….
I was at boarding school in Sussex then. We (myself and some friends) went out late because “the wind was good” to try to fly a badly made kite. After falling over numerous times, and losing the kite, we decided to head back in. Then the power went off. And some windows broke. Half the boys were up and about, and half were hiding in bed. We were all mocking each other, but the fact was we were probably all on the verge of wetting ourselves – the noise in the old building was astonishing.
Morning came, and it was only then that we realised how bad things were. One (exterior) classroom destroyed. Long lengths of wall smashed by fallen trees (which missed the building by inches). The roof had turret-dome things on the corners which were on the ground in many pieces. Roof damage, window damage, don’t even ask about the victorian glasshouse…
Our few resident teachers decided to send us on a “run” around the woods (as was normal for PE when nothing better was happening) in order to get us out of the way for the cleanup of the more dangerous things. But teachers, being a pretty clueless bunch, had not taken time to consider what that involved. It took us nearly an hour to get to the entry into the woods. The roads were completely blocked by fallen trees. The woods themselves? Devastated. No. Annihilated. Proud oaks and birches and something else once stood. Now what wasn’t lying down was snapped in half. I could look into what the day before was a dense forest and see the next town. I burst into tears, turned around, went back. As it happens, that was a wise thing to do, the needed to send search and rescue for those that followed the instruction literally. I bet the teachers got a bollocking for that.
One thing I will relate, however, is that I have ALWAYS had a lot of respect for BT. The day after the storm, BT men were around. Their trucks couldn’t get anywhere near the little hamlet so they carried their tools and dragged big spools of wire. They did an amazingly hacky lash-up job fixing the line to anything still standing. The local exchange was flattened, and somebody said it caught fire as well. But, you know what, at half six in the evening all the phones started ringing for about twenty seconds. And then the phones were working. For the rest of the day AND the day following, phone calls were free. I called my mother and played the entire Radio Mercury (remember them?) news bulletin from a payphone. When I hung up, it gave me my 10p coin back.
We ate like kings, for the freezers had no power so we had to eat up or chuck out. Some of the food was a bit odd, it must have been a challenge working in a large kitchen by candlelight. The emergency lights only lasted about ten hours, most of that was the night of the storm. It took nearly a week to get the power on. But the phones. Communication. The ability to call our parents. I don’t know if this was BT policy or if they did this specifically for us, but – RESPECT.
When I last passed the area, the woods were recovering, but it will not be in my lifetime that anybody will see them as I remember them. The smaller storm that followed in 1990 didn’t help either, that damaged a number of saplings. I thought it was criminal that the groundskeepers were cutting down decent trees, but none fell in 1990. I now think they identified “weak” trees and took them down before they were pushed.
But, many years have passed. The juniors I knew have long gone. All of the staff has changed. I popped by for a visit in 2001 and the dormitories had different names, the classrooms were assigned different purposes. The only thing that seemed eternal was the yucky two-tone paint scheme (vomit yellow and gaudy green in some parts!). That is the problem with nostalgia. Like going back to your home town a decade or two later and you’re like “OMG, I don’t *know* this place!”.
Anyway, hey… thanks for the memories.
No Rick, thank you. What a great personal account of the Great Storm. Bitter sweet memories perhaps, but that’s certainly a story to tell the grandkids.
Personally all I remember was hearing the wind blowing like mad and hearing my Dad keep saying, “Cor! Hark at that wind”, which now I type it makes it sound like I was a kid in the 1880s, not 1980s.
Apart from that my biggest memories come from seeing all the devastation on the news.
that car is a 08 car but its in 1987, god i love the film back to th future
Well spotted Tim, you found my, er, deliberate mistake! 😉 Yes, that’ll do…
25 years ago today!