As day dawned on 27 November 1703, people across the southern half of England and Wales thanked god they were still alive and then emerged from their battered homes to survey the damage. The night had been filled with the howling and screeching of a wind wilder than anything they had heard before, punctuated by the crash of falling chimneys and the shattering of glass. Around the coast, the wind drowned out the cries of shipwrecked sailors.
Daylight revealed a land littered with debris 鈥� tiles, masonry, sheets of lead torn from cathedral roofs, rubble from fallen steeples, and a cow wedged in the top branches of a tree. Where there had been hundreds of ships at anchor, there were wrecks. Across the English Channel, the same fearsome winds had blasted their way across northern Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. Those who lived through that night knew they had survived a storm like no other.
NOVEMBER had been a truly awful month. For two weeks, high winds and rain squalls lashed Britain. Chimney stacks collapsed, tiles flew off the roofs of houses and ships foundered. On the 24th night of the month, a yet more violent tempest battered the country. It blew all night, all day and a second night before heading out into the North Sea on the morning of 26 November. The country heaved a collective sigh of relief and looked forward to a quiet night鈥檚 sleep.
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They were out of luck. To the west, over the Atlantic, something worse was on its way. The few people who owned a barometer knew trouble was coming. 鈥淎bout 10 o鈥檆lock our barometer informed us that the night would be very tempestuous,鈥� wrote Daniel Defoe, then a relatively unknown pamphleteer lodging in London. 鈥淭he mercury had sunk lower than I had ever observed.鈥�
Around midnight, a new storm passed over the coast of Wales. It powered on across the southern half of England, reaching London in the early hours of the morning. The most violent stage of the storm lasted five or six hours before it headed off to visit death and destruction on Holland and Denmark.
The aftermath was appalling. All across England buildings had been blown down, churches had lost their spires,and cathedrals were damaged. The Eddystone lighthouse, completed only four years earlier, vanished in the night with both its keeper and its creator Henry Winstanley. Wrecks littered the coastlines on both sides of the Channel. Hundreds of ships and perhaps as many as 10,000 men were lost along the south and east coasts of England.
For three centuries, the storm of 1703 has been legendary. Those who lived through it would never forget, but the man who ensured the legend lasted was Daniel Defoe. In the weeks immediately after the storm, Defoe gathered hundreds of eyewitness accounts and published them in his book The Storm or, A Collection Of the most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters Which happen鈥檇 in the Late Dreadful Tempest both by Sea and Land. Defoe had no doubt that the storm was 鈥渢he greatest, the longest in duration, the widest in extent, of all the Tempests and storms that history gives any account of since the Beginning of time鈥�. And buried in the book was a possible explanation for its ferocity. A few days earlier, wrote Defoe, there had been an 鈥渦nusual tempest鈥� on the coast of Florida and Virginia. The storm, he hinted, was a hurricane that blasted its way from the Caribbean up the coast of America and across the Atlantic.
But was the Great Storm really the greatest storm ever to hit England? Its awesome reputation rests partly on the terrible loss of ships and their crews. But that was not entirely down to the strength of the storm, says Dennis Wheeler, a climatologist at the University of Sunderland. The weather had been bad for weeks, with strong westerly winds blowing up the Channel. These speeded the return of ships coming home for the winter from the Atlantic and Mediterranean. At the same time, ships wanting to sail down the Channel were trapped by the westerlies. Around the south and east coasts of England, East Indiamen, fleets of colliers and other merchant shipping jostled for space with a large part of the Royal Navy. Britain was embroiled in the War of the Spanish Succession, and the navy鈥檚 troopships were waiting to set off for landings in mainland Europe. 鈥淚f the Channel hadn鈥檛 been chock-a-block with ships then it wouldn鈥檛 have been such a disaster,鈥� says Wheeler.
There鈥檚 no denying the ferocity of the storm: there was some scientific data to show how bad it was. Richard Townley in Lancashire and William Derham, the vicar of Upminster near London, both logged the plunging mercury in their barometers. At the centre of the storm, the air pressure was remarkably low at just 950 millibars. There were no instruments to measure the speed of the wind, but the late, great climatologist Hubert Lamb put it at some 170 kilometres an hour 鈥� with even stronger gusts.
Lamb made an exhaustive study of historic storms and came up with an index of severity based on their greatest wind speeds, duration and the area hit by them. He ranked Defoe鈥檚 鈥淕reat Storm鈥� fifth. Britons clearly had short memories: only nine years earlier, a more severe storm had been responsible for the Culbin sands disaster, which buried 16 farms and around 3000 hectares of the most fertile land in Scotland.
Nor it seems was there anything peculiar about the storm鈥檚 origin. The notion that it was a hurricane is a myth, says Allen Perry, a climatologist at the University of Wales at Swansea. 鈥淏ecause of the storm鈥檚 notoriety there鈥檚 a tendency for people to demonise it and think it must have had an extraordinary origin,鈥� he says. Hurricanes can make it across the Atlantic as far as the British Isles but rarely later in the year than September. In 1703, England still followed the old Julian calendar: by today鈥檚 calendar, the storm struck on 7 December. This was also near the end of the Little Ice Age when the sea was probably cooler than it is now, says Perry. 鈥淗urricanes derive their power and energy from crossing warm seas. The sea temperature at that time is just not high enough to sustain a tropical storm.鈥�
Besides, there鈥檚 no need to invoke a tropical hurricane to explain its power. The Great Storm has much in common with some more recent highly destructive storms. The similarly misnamed 鈥渉urricane鈥� that hit southern England on 16 October 1987 killed 18 people and caused more than a billion pounds鈥� worth of damage. And in 1999, Europe was hit by three devastating storms in quick succession. The first, on 3 December, struck northern Germany and Denmark. The second, on 26 December, left a trail of destruction from north-west France to Switzerland; and the third, one day later, hit southern France and northern Spain. Between them they claimed more than 130 lives and caused damage costing about 卢13 billion.
In each case, the depression developed extremely fast, producing very intense circulation at the centre, says John Methven, a meteorologist at the University of Reading. Each storm was steered over the ocean by a strong, straight jet stream. And in each case there was a band of unusually warm moist air just south of the jet stream. And in 1703? There is not enough meteorological data to say. 鈥淏ut the strong westerlies for two weeks before the storm hit certainly accords with a straight jet stream across the Atlantic and it seems likely its development could have been similar,鈥� says Methven.
Today, the big question is whether global warming will bring more ferocious storms. The climate models don鈥檛 yet have an answer, although recent studies show that there are likely to be fewer storms 鈥� but more of them will be strong ones. 鈥淥verall there will be more damage from storms,鈥� says Methven. In any case, it would be wise to be prepared, he says. 鈥淭here should be contingency plans. These extra-tropical storms can be just as damaging as a hurricane.鈥�