• 8,000 lives were lost, a large swathe of the Royal Navy was wiped out and the Eddystone lighthouse off Plymouth was obliterated
• Bishop was found ‘with his brains dash’d out’ after trying to flee from bed
• Torn from its moorings in Cornwall, one ship with its crew still inside ended up on Isle of Wight’s coast – 200 miles away

By
Tony Rennell

Last updated at 2:18 PM on 6th January 2012

Not even the godfearing could escape the wrath of the storm.

The Bishop of Bath and Wells was tucked up in his four-poster bed when the wind blew in the roof of his episcopal palace. He tried to flee but it was too late.

The chimney stacks came crashing down, plunging bishop and wife through the floor, burying both in the rubble.

He was found, it was reported, ‘with his brains dash’d out’ while she had wrapped herself in the sheets out of sheer terror and suffocated. They were the most eminent victims of the most catastrophic and destructive storm ever recorded as hitting the shores of Britain.

The Great Storm of 1703 caused devastation in just one 24 hour spell

Gale force winds whip up the sea around Seaham Habour lighthouse, in County Durham yesterday. Storms and heavy downpours wreaked fresh havoc across Britain causing damage, delays and injuries

The country has trembled this week, rocked by 100mph-plus winds which caused injuries and two reported deaths, but these were relatively endurable conditions compared with the tiger of all tempests, the Great Storm of 1703.

The author Daniel Defoe put the death toll of the storm at around 8,000

It is often overlooked. Historians acknowledge the bad weather that almost stopped William the Conqueror in 1066 and the ‘protestant wind’ saw off the Spanish Armada in 1588. The epic snow-bound winter of 1947 and the forest- felling ‘hurricane’ of 1987 have both passed into legend.

But the daddy of all these disasters — the one against which this week’s heavy winds can justifiably be measured — was three centuries ago, in the reign of Queen Anne.

As an area of low-pressure tracked its way across the centre of the country on the Friday night and Saturday morning of November 26/27, 8,000 lives were lost, a large swathe of the Royal Navy was wiped out and the Eddystone lighthouse off Plymouth was obliterated.

‘Never was such a storm of wind, such a hurricane and tempest known in the memory of man,’ wrote a chronicler of the times, ‘nor the like to be found in the histories of England.’

Gusts in the English Channel topped 140mph. So fierce was the wind that a ship torn from its moorings in the Helford River in Cornwall was blown helplessly, its cowering crew still on board as mountainous seas tossed it, for 200 miles before grounding on the Isle of Wight eight hours later.

Its mast smashed, a ship lies wrecked on the coast. The Royal Navy lost 14 warships and 1,500 crew in the storm

The low pressure system causing all this was astonishing. Daniel Defoe, writer and political commentator (and later the renowned author of Robinson Crusoe) could not believe how low the mercury in his barometer had sunk, and suspected at first that his children had been messing about with the instrument.

What was actually taking place was what historian Martin Brayne terms ‘the most terrifying and catastrophic storm this island has ever known’. The hurricane-force winds caused havoc on land.

Trees were uprooted and reduced to mere matchwood. Hundreds of the windmills that dotted the landscape were destroyed and at least one burst into flames from the friction as the sails whizzed round at extraordinary speed — an uncanny precursor of the modern- day wind turbine that caught fire at Ardrossan in Scotland during high winds last month.

Church spires — which a combination of religious piety and architectural technology had been making ever higher — toppled.

A curate in Kent was distraught to see his landmark spire, close to 200ft and the tallest in the county, dashed to the ground.

Lead was stripped from roofs, simply rolled up like scrolls by the unstoppable force of the wind. Tons of it were torn from the roof of Queen’s College, Oxford, and then sent hurtling through the window of the church opposite.

Gusts in the English Channel topped an incredible 140mph

At Cambridge, pinnacles were blown from the top of King’s College Chapel. Gloucester, Ely and Bristol cathedrals took batterings, and the godly were convinced that the biblical proportions of what was happening meant Judgment Day was upon them.

Homes were just as vulnerable,with falling chimneys a widespread hazard. A moralising chronicler recounted the tragic tale of a child asleep in a cradle a foot from its parents’ bed.

‘The fall of a chimney beat out the infant’s brains and mashed the whole body, in the father’s and mother’s sight.

‘From whence we may observe that, in a general calamity innocency suffers with the guilty, and the poor babe is destroyed with a stroke of divine vengeance while the sinful parents are permitted to stretch out their lives.’

There was a near miss for the Royal Family. At St James’s Palace, Queen Anne and her husband, Prince George, fled from their rooms just minutes before a chimney stack crashed in. As she then stood at a window and watched the trees in the park being torn apart, a garden wall fell.

‘Many houses demolished, many people killed,’ noted the London-based diarist John Evelyn.

Then, when he managed to get to his country house in Kent, he was depressed by the sight of thousands of ‘goodly oaks lying in ghastly postures, like regiments fallen in battle’.

It was the British Isles coastline which saw the worst of the storm, with 1,200 people dying on the Goodwin sand bank in the English Channel

He took it all as divine retribution ‘for our national sins, and my own’.

Around the British coast, there were serious problems with flooding as high tides, whipped up by the wind, surged over inadequate sea defences. Both sides of the Severn estuary were awash.

But it was at sea — the essential highway of an expanding maritime nation — that the havoc was greatest. Dozens of the hundreds of colliers plying the east coast with Tyneside coal for London simply disappeared after trying to ride out the storm at anchor.

Cables snapped in the heaving seas and they were gone.

Further south, the Solent was dotted with wrecks. On one of these, the Newcastle, a 50-gun naval man-of-war, 197 of the 233 crew drowned. Those ships that survived did so because their crews not only hauled down all sails but took axes and hacked down the masts and rigging to deck level to give themselves any chance of staying upright.

One captain of a warship that was escorting 130 merchant ships towards Ireland ordered his fleet to take refuge in Milford Haven, West Wales, when the storm was at its height.

He recorded ‘the dismal sight of ships, some without masts, some sunk and others upon the rocks. The wind was blowing so hard, with thunder, lightning and rain, that a man could not stand on deck. Nigh on 30 merchant ships are lost.’

There were tales of enormous courage and luck, such as the sailor who was washed off one sinking ship by a mighty wave and deposited on the quarterdeck of another, which managed to stay afloat. BUT there were also examples of gross inhumanity.

This image shows a flash of lightning striking what appears to be a lighthouse. Many believed the storm was divine retribution

In the English Channel, numerous ships were blown onto the treacherous Goodwin Sands, a sandbank in the English Channel, and stayed there until the tide washed over them and drowned their crews as they hung upon the broken masts and rigging.

The Kent mainland was just six miles away but folk there did little to help save lives.

Instead, these ‘cannibals’ and ‘monsters’, as an angry Defoe termed them, waited until the sea had claimed the marooned men before moving in to scavenge what they could from the wrecks and the bodies.

‘Boats came very near the stranded men in quest of booty and plunder, but nobody concerned themselves for the lives of these miserable creatures,’

Defoe wrote in The Storm, a chronicle of the ‘dreadful tempest’ which he published the following year. Close to 1,200 lives were lost on the treacherous Goodwin sand bank.

The most spectacular casualty of the storm was one of the recent wonders of the age — the newlybuilt Eddystone lighthouse, a warning beacon on a dangerous reef in the middle of the sea 14 miles south of Plymouth.

It had been completed just five years earlier as the result of the mad-inventor  determination and engineering skill of one Henry Winstanley.

It had taken two years to build, its stone base secured to the wave-tossed and frequently unreachable rock by a dozen 12-ft iron rods. Winstanley was convinced it could stand up to anything that Nature could throw at it.

So confident, in fact, that, as the storm began to brew on the morning of November 26, he hitched what turned out to be a suicidal ride on a supply ship to go there and experience for himself how his brainchild would defy the elements.

It didn’t. Winstanley died inside his own creation as, battered by 60ft waves and whipped by incredible winds, the wooden superstructure cracked and it crumbled into the sea.

As for the storm, it blew away as quickly as it had come, roaring across to the European mainland before petering out.

Back in Britain, the country was left to count the cost.

The Navy had lost 14 of its principal fighting ships and 1,500 crew. Defoe put the total loss of life at around 8,000.

But if true, it was a huge slice out of a small nation. Britain’s population was just five million.

It was as if, today, 100,000 people had in a single day and night been slaughtered.

And the cause of all this mayhem?

At the time, the almost universally accepted explanation was that this was the hand of God at work, handing out divine retribution.

‘I pray that we may all repent’, wrote one sea captain, who had survived the onslaught, ‘for doubtless this was a warning against us of God’s anger.’

From a 21st-century viewpoint, the tempest of 1703 has a different explanation — as the sort of exceptional climatic event that occurs perhaps once every 500 years.

At the very least, it puts this week’s stormy weather in perspective.

It could, indeed, have been a lot worse.

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