In future centuries when the historic floods of England are spoken of, they will talk of the great flood of 1947. There have been floods before during which, in one river or another, the waters have risen as high as or even higher than they did in the spring of that year, though such occasions have been rare.

But never, in any history of which we have record, have nearly all the main rivers of the south, the midlands and the northeast of England swollen into such deep flood simultaneously, or persisted in flood for such a length of time. There may, of course, in distant centuries have been a general English flood as bad, or worse; but if so, there is no record of it, nor have contemporary writers referred to it. In modern times, at any rate, the flood of 1947 was unique for its volume and persistence.

The flow of the Thames in 1947, for instance, was exceeded by that in 1894, but the earlier flood did not persist for so long. To find a similar flood of the Ouse at York, one must go back to 1831. The Welland, flowing into the fens, rose six inches higher at Spalding than it ever had before. It had been reckoned that the flow of the Great Ouse, that other fenland river, was never likely to exceed 7,700 cubic feet of water per second; in 1947 the recording apparatus went out of action when the flow already exceeded 10,000 cubic feet of water per second, and the waters were still rising. The flood of the Lea, of which records have been kept continuously for a hundred years, was greater than ever previously noted. At Worcester, the Severn rose higher than it had done since 1770.

And so one could go on, river by river. The flood of 1947, taken as a whole, was probably the worst that England has experienced, at any rate for several centuries.

The extent of the flooding, too, was phenomenal. In all, at some time or another during the floods, 690,000 acres of land were inundated. This is roughly equal to the farming area of the whole county of Kent. And of these flooded areas, 325,000 acres were arable land, urgently needed to grow the nation's food. The total cost of flood damage, including loss of existing crops, was estimated at œ12,000,000.

What, then, caused this great flood? The winter caused it. Few Englishmen are likely to forget those winter months of January, February and March, 1947, coming as they did to a country fighting to recover from the after-effects of the war~fighting for production, for food, for fuel. They were months of blizzards, of rainstorms, of hurricane winds. Every traveller felt them as he struggled to pass from one point to another along snow- blocked roads or hindered railways. Every town- dweller felt them as the coal was held up in port or siding, and the gas and electricity supplies to his house dipped and wavered, while the fire in his hearth sank low.