As Britain is battered by Storm Ciaran, Thomas Pakenham recalls the Great Storm of 15-16 October 1987
It was three o’clock in the morning of 16th October 1987. Bleary-eyed, I peered out of the bedroom window of our terraced house in Notting Hill.
Something strange was happening in the communal garden below. My favourite magnolia was rolling across the lawn. Clearly a nightmare. I went back to sleep.
Next day, and in the days succeeding, Londoners were told they had lived through the most violent storm since 1703. But it was hard to believe. The Great Storm, if it was one (and technically it was not a hurricane, as hurricanes come only from the tropics), had been oddly selective in its choice of victims.
At one end of our street, a tall lime tree had been decapitated, its neck broken and its branches dropped onto the pavement. The rest of the trees – birch and false acacia – were still standing proud. Of course, many streets were choked with leaves and branches. I found the same pattern in other parts of London. At Kew, most of the famous trees survived, although one large exotic evergreen, a Turner’s oak, was lifted clean out of the ground and then replaced without loss of a branch or a root.
The late-18th-century plane trees of Berkeley Square survived almost without a scratch. So did the later planted planes of other squares in Mayfair. The Royal Parks – Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens – were closed for a few days. When they reopened, I found, to my relief, all my favourite trees (including the dead elm dedicated to Peter Pan) had been spared. Some storms, it appears, choose their victims like African famines do: coolly (I almost said calmly) singling out the very old and the very young.
South of London, however, the storm was anything but calm. It burst over Kent and Sussex with the force of 10,000 bombs. Trees were, of course, the principal victims. Whole avenues of limes and beech were skittled. At Petworth, a line of beech trees, celebrated in Turner’s landscapes, was razed to the ground as if the storm was a crashing plane. Strange to say, the storm then bounced over the ridge, leaving the only surviving beech on the summit.
Other famous parks and gardens in Kent and Sussex – Nymans, Wakehurst, Leonardslee, Sheffield Park, Knole, Bedgebury – were dealt with equally brutally. Thirty years later, the scars, and the mutilations, are still only too visible. Their shelter belts were smashed open and most of their tallest trees – pines, oaks and firs – ripped out of the ground.
Surviving trees, such as the hydra-headed cedar on the lawn at Nymans, looked mortally wounded. At the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, the storm got a left and a right. It felled a huge English elm, one of the miraculous survivors of the elm plague of the 1960s and 1970s. The elm ended up in one of the Prince Regent’s gorgeous reception rooms, but fortunately found no one at home.
And this was the miracle of the Great Storm of ’87. Trees died by the million, but few people were killed, as the storm came and went by night. Human casualties were not much more than in a bad traffic accident: 18 unlucky people were crushed by trees or buildings.
Michael Fish shouldn’t have been attacked for his infamous weather forecast on 15th October, ‘Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you’re watching, don’t worry – there isn’t!’
Technically, the storm wasn’t a hurricane. Few people predicted the scale of the storm, which started in the Bay of Biscay. Only one meteorological vessel was on duty in the right area of the Atlantic – not enough to give a firm prediction of the storm’s characteristics.
How different it had been in earlier centuries. The apocalyptic storm of November 1703 raged for several days and covered a much wider swath of southern England. The Church of England declared it was God’s vengeance on the nation for its sins. Oaks were uprooted in tens of thousands: the huge, crooked oaks that served Queen Anne’s strategic fleet. John Evelyn, the diarist and author of Sylva, lost 2,000 large oaks in his own park at Wotton in Surrey.
He wrote the following year, ‘I still hear, sure I am that I still feel, the dismal groans of our forests, that late hurricane… having subverted so many thousands of goodly Oaks, prostrating the trees, laying them in ghastly postures, like whole regiments fallen in battle by the sword of the Conqueror, and crushing all that grew beneath them.’
The human fatalities were described by Daniel Defoe in his 1704 book The Storm. The well documented history of the storm reads like a novel (and, according to some scholars, actually is one). Queen Anne was nearly killed by slates flying from St James’s Palace; she took refuge in the cellar. Defoe had a narrow escape when the wall of a building collapsed. The storm killed at least 10,000 people. The Bishop of Wells and his wife were crushed in their bed by falling masonry.
But most of the dead were humble farmers or sailors. Floods drowned more than 1,500 people in the low-lying fields and villages of the Somerset Levels. More than 8,000 sailors came to grief, driven out to sea or driven back to land and wrecked on Goodwin Sands. The majority were left to drown because fishermen from nearby Deal were busy looting wrecked ships.
Ireland and Scotland escaped both the great storms of 1703 and 1987. But on 6th January 1839, a storm smashed into Ireland and western Scotland – apparently the most destructive storm ever recorded, nicknamed the Night of the Big Wind. It proved critical for people claiming the old age pension created in 1909. What could they remember of that night, seventy years before?
Fallen trees blocked roads all over the country. A quarter of the houses in the north of Dublin were blown down or burnt to the ground. Towers and spires collapsed in many towns. Lord Castlemaine died when he fiddled with the clasp of the window of his elegant country house, Moydrum Castle in County Westmeath. He was blown on his back and ‘instantly expired’.
Most of the dead were poor and anonymous. Forty-two ships were wrecked and most of their crews drowned. Tens of thousands of cottiers (small farmers living in turf cabins) lost their homes and livestock. No one knows how many of these victims of the storm later died of hunger and exposure. Of course, more horrors were waiting in the wings, with the Great Famine of 1845-49.
How pampered we were, by comparison, in the England of 1987. There was even a silver lining. When the smashed trunks and branches were cleared, more people began to plant trees and take interest in the species planted. Should we plant a walnut or a ginkgo? What about Tai-Haku, the great white cherry lost in Japan and rediscovered in Tunbridge Wells, when the storm exposed it to newly curious eyes?
The Forestry Commission, which lost whole hillsides of dull, green spruce in the storm, was deservedly slated. For eighty years, its approach to forestry had been crudely commercial. Now it had made ‘conifer’ a dirty word. Belatedly, the commission became more sensitive to the aesthetics of forestry and planted screens of deciduous trees such as oak and beech. Large sums were raised from the public to acquire land for planting with a dozen different hardwoods; as well as to replace the millions of trees lost (although some experts, such as the late Oliver Rackham, explained that many uprooted trees could be left to re-shoot from the stumps).
But perhaps the most important dividend paid us by the great storm was in gardens and parks. All over south England, vistas had been disfigured by shrubs and trees that were now too big for purpose. An Indian cedar, designed a century earlier to complement a vista leading to a Hindu folly, now blocked it completely. A low mound of Himalayan rhododendrons had become a mountain. A shelter belt, designed to protect a rose bed, was now strangling it. But owners and curators felt too inhibited to sign the death warrant of their own trees. It needed the hand of the storm – call it the hand of God, if you like – to sweep away the offending trees and plants.
And that was the hand I saw at three in the morning in Notting Hill, destroying my favourite magnolia, which was blocking our vista down the garden.
