Fierce storms batter Britain
Thousands are killed as winds and floods devastate the nation
When Daniel Defoe got up on Friday, W
7 December 1703, he noticed that it was extremely windy. He thought little of it until the evening, when he glanced at his barometer and spotted the “Mercury sunk lower than ever I had observ’d it” #V TUV Defoe
thought that “the Tube had been handled and disturb’d by the Children”. He was wrong. That night, Britain was hit by one of the worst storms in its history. “No pen could describe it,” he wrote, “no tongue can express it, no thought conceive it unless some of those who were in the extremity of it.”
How many died will never be known, though some estimates suggest at least 8,000. In .QPFQP YJGTG VJG YKPFU DNGY VJG NGCF TQQH Qʘ Westminster Abbey and destroyed perhaps 2,000 chimney stacks, Queen Anne took refuge in the cellars of St James’s Palace. In the Channel, more than a dozen Royal Navy ships were sunk with the loss of hundreds of lives. In the West Country, hundreds of windmills were destroyed and the region also saw hundreds FTQYPGF CU VJG 5QOGTUGV .GXGNU ʚQQFGF
Meanwhile, in Wells, the bishop and his wife were killed in their bed by a collapsing chimney.
Defoe spent the night with his family, unable to sleep for the noise and terror. Alarmed that their own roof might come down, he opened the door to see if they might sneak to safety. But when he saw a blizzard of tiles outside, he decided it was better to risk death “in the ruins of the house, rather than to meet most certain destruction in the open garden”.
He survived, of course, and turned his experience into his 1704 volume The Storm, YJKEJ KU QHVGP FGUETKDGF CU VJG TUV OQFGTP journalistic book. But like most people, he was deeply shaken. A few weeks later, the government declared a national day of fasting, since the storm was an obvious sign of “divine displeasure” with England.