THE STORM

By Philip Morgan

Horror and Confusion seiz’d upon all, whether on Shore or at Sea: No Pen can describe it, no Tongue can express it, no Thought conceive it, unless some of those who were in the Extremity of it…. Daniel Defoe, 1704.

In 1514, during the reign of Henry VII, the French attacked from the sea and burned Brighton, or Brighthelmstone as it was known at the time, to the ground. All that was left was the Church on the Hill, St Nicholas, and the outline of the streets in smouldering embers. Within 60 years, in 1580, due to its resilience and closeness to London, Brighton had a fishing fleet of 80 boats, 400 fishermen, and 10,000 nets, a population of 3,000, and was one of the most prosperous towns in Sussex. What the sea had taken, it gave back. This ambivalent relationship with the sea, both provider and destroyer, is a pattern repeated over and again in the history of the town.

In the 16th century, Brighton was a town of two halves. The farmers and merchants lived inland in and around what is now North Street. The majority of the fishing community lived on the beach in the Lower Town. They were close to their boats, which were launched from and beached on the shingle. Their houses were built on tenements, plots of land, below the low chalk cliffs that stretched below what is now known as the Laines, where some of the more prosperous fishermen lived.

Over the years, the sea gnawed at the land, and the Lower Town steadily shrank in size. In 1665, it was recorded that 150 acres of land had been swallowed by the sea in Hove and another 50 acres in Brighton. In the Lower Town, twenty-two tenements that had supported twelve shops, four capstans and three cottages were swallowed. The dispossessed fishermen were given access to plots of land on ‘the waste’, a waterlogged field, that became the Steyne, which indicated how much they were valued! They did all the work and took all the risks while the owners of the boats, the middlemen and the wholesalers took all the cash.

If you had been on Brighton beach on November 26th 1703, and fancied buying some fresh salt herring, you might have followed a young fishing lad across the windy shingle past the capstan and the piles of nets to his home. The edge of the roof only reached your shoulder. The boy smiled as you ducked to enter, and said it was that low so the storms would slide over the top and not rip it off. The walls were made of whatever could be scavenged from the beach: mud, chalk, flints, timber from wrecked and abandoned boats and coated in pitch to keep the wet out and hold the hut together. You ducked in through the one doorway. It was dark inside, no window except for a small hatch. There’s just one room. The floor is chalk and earth smoothed out by bare and calloused feet. There’s a bench on one side where a woman, the lad’s mother, you assume, is salting herring. A ladder goes up to the low roof. You hear the rustling of straw, and a child’s face peers at you from a loft, which is more like a shelf.

You do your deal and, clutching your herring, go back out onto the beach. The wind has got stronger. You turn up your collar. You shudder as you feel a sudden drop in air pressure. You glance at the gathering clouds and the disturbed sea and turn away, hurry back to your comfortable house up on North Street, away from the sea. Earlier that day, somewhere over the Atlantic, a curl of cold air had met a tongue of warmer, moisture-heavy air drifting northwards from the tropics. Nothing remarkable, just a standard unsettled pressure field. But a winter jet stream racing overhead towards Europe grasped it and accelerated it and caused its pressure to abruptly fall in an ‘explosive deepening’. Air rushed in to fill the vacuum formed in the centre, but was flung out by the earth’s rotation and there in the centre of the storm, a ‘sting-jet’ formed: a narrow sub-zero wind that accelerated to over 100 miles an hour and, after midnight, hit Brighton like a hammer. The young fisher lad would have snuggled down on his straw mattress to the familiar sound of the wind and sea. Nothing to be alarmed at. But then the shack would have trembled. The sounds of the wind and waves built to a frenzy increasing until his dad grabbed him and the others and bent double against the force of a wind that felt as if it had weight, that didn’t blow but struck until it knocked them off their feet and made them crawl to the cliff desperate to reach some sort of safety before being swept into the sea. It struck your house, ripped off the slates, and tumbled your brick chimneys into your bedchamber. It wasn’t only fishermen who died that night.

“The Number of People drowned are not easily Guest; but by all the Calculations I have made and seen made, we are within compass, if we reckon 8000 Men lost, including what were lost on the Coast of Holland, what in Ships blown away, and never heard of, and what were drowned in the Flood of the Severn, and in the River of Thames.” Daniel Defoe 1704

Many Brighton households lost husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. ‘Deryck Pain Jnr, master of the ketch “Elizabeth” with all his crew. George Taylor, master of the ketch “Happy Entrance” and his crew, except Walter Street, who survived on a mast in the sea for three days. Richard Webb, master of the ketch “Richard & Rose” with all his crew. One man was lost from the “Richard & Benjamin” off Chichester. Robert Kitchener, master of the “Cholmley”, with 9 men. 5 men and a boy were rescued’. These were not the only people who died but then ‘ordinary’ fisherfolks’ names were rarely recorded.

In the morning, the town looked as if it had been bombed. Roofs were gone, trees uprooted, houses collapsed. Between 26 and 40 fishermen’s cottages had disappeared without a trace. Bodies of drowned sailors washed up along the Sussex coast for days and weeks afterwards.

On August 11th 1705, a further catastrophic storm buried every house that remined below the cliffs under mounds of shingle and destroyed many of the surviving fishing boats. The town entered a disastrous decline. It looked like the sea had won. But Dr Richard Russell arrived with his theories of seawater as medicine. Brighton became Dr Brighton. Sea bathing became fashionable. And what had so nearly destroyed Brighton once again brought it back to life.

Calendar note: The dates in this article are Julian (Old Style) as used by Defoe and J.A.Erredge who talk about the night of 26/27 November 1703 O.S., which corresponds to 7/8 December 1703 in the modern Gregorian calendar.