Taming the Flood: Rivers, Wetlands and the Centuries-Old Battle Against Flooding. Jeremy Purseglove

Parliament empowered the boards to carry out even more extensive work at the request of county war agricultural executive committees. Government offered a 50 per cent grant for such work, which remained in force after the war. In 1951 the Heneage Report recommended that the length of ‘main river’ to be cleared by river boards be trebled, thus extending their jurisdiction to over 12,000 miles of river. For those who have eyes to see, the legacy of all this activity, rigorously maintained, and in some cases extended by water authorities in the 1970s and 1980s, is a river system in the lowlands of England and Wales which is profoundly impoverished. If the traveller looks out of the car or train window or takes a walk along the local brook and bears in mind what a river should look like, they cannot fail to notice, in many places, mile upon mile of treeless river bank, often devoid of even a decent margin of bulrush. A survey of the middle reaches of the river Idle in Nottinghamshire in 1980 discovered two clumps of marginal plants and three trees over five miles of river. In the late 1930s the Sussex Rother was subjected to total clearance at Bodiam. The scars remain. The Staffordshire Blithe, whose lower reaches escaped the axe and are therefore witness to how exquisite a properly managed river can be, was picked out for special mention in the Journal of Agriculture for 1927. Its upper reaches remain bare, and are eroding rapidly.

      FLOODS AND WAR

      This policy of river clearance was originally supported by two fundamental considerations. When war broke out in 1939, the combination of a depressed agriculture at home and a convenient empire abroad had ensured that around 70 per cent of the nation’s food was imported from overseas. Hitler’s U-boat campaign, the memory of which still haunts decision-makers in the English countryside, nearly succeeded in blockading our coast. Despite rationing and a vigorous ‘Dig for Victory’ – not to mention ‘Drain for Victory’ – campaign, the people of Britain were in danger of starving. Supplies of food ran sufficiently low to pose a threat as serious as invasion. It was with this in mind that a unanimous Parliament supported not a conspiracy of Tory landowners, but Attlee’s post-war Labour Government in passing the 1947 Agriculture Act, which laid the foundations for the great agricultural revolution of our times. By 1973, when Britain entered the Common Market under the shadow of increasing anxiety to improve our balance of payments, Attlee’s policy of farm protection had been extended by a massive subsidy of capital grants, tax concessions, and price supports; and the impact on the landscape, including the river systems, was really beginning to bite. Significantly, the same Parliament that passed the 1947 Agriculture Act also brought into being the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, thus creating the planning system that, to this day, regulates all aspects of British life except agriculture and forestry, which remain largely exempt.

      In the black winter of early 1947, something else happened which was to provide a general justification for the next forty years of dredging and river clearance. On the night of 16 March, waters from melting snow began to burst the flood-banks in the Fens. Wentworth-Day, who lived through it all, describes the experience:

      Throughout the black night came the dull thunder of the bursting banks, the village alarm of ‘she’ve blowed’. The river is always feminine. In a thousand remote little farmhouses and cottages, islanded beneath wind-shriven willows or leaning poplars, the racing floods covered the black fields, overflowed the straight dykes … and leaping upon those lonely homes with all the relentless force of wind and gales, burst open the doors, shattered the ground floor windows … and rushed gurgling and swirling up the narrow staircase.⁵⁶

      In the freezing cold and pitch dark, families were driven to clinging to the roof. In the south level 37,000 acres went under water, and the chief engineer of the Great Ouse catchment board considered it the worst fen flood since the time of Vermuyden.

      Disasters of this sort were confined to neither traditionally flooded land nor the winter months. In August 1952 the innocent-looking East and West Lyn rivers swept down into the Devon resort of Lynmouth, obliterating houses and removing all trace of the Beach Hotel, which was carried out to sea.⁵⁷ Thirty-three people were drowned, and the main street was transformed overnight into a dramatically boulder-strewn river bed. This flood, in a narrow valley, exacerbated, it was thought, by trees blocking the bridges upstream, was different in kind from the inundation of large areas of low-lying land in East Anglia. It helped set in motion renewed enthusiasm for tree clearance in upland catchment areas as yet another aspect of the land drainage solution.

      The following February, floods again struck the east coast, from Northumberland to Kent. The casualty list was 307, and the devastation immense. On Canvey Island alone, 11,000 people were rendered homeless.⁵⁸ Coronation Day, in June 1953, was a memorably wet day. While the symbols of civilization processed with full panoply of State through the streets of London, out on the eastern marshes the North Sea nudged at the coastal defences which had been hastily shored up after the calamity just four months before. Our era was ushered in with a reminder that the flood remained not entirely tamed.

      The twist in the story of river and wetland management in our own times was to be one in which drainage engineers were faced with a new army; an army which, unlike that of the commoners who had opposed their predecessors, was to grow stronger with every passing year. It was to come from an unexpected quarter: the environmentalists. Just as the drainers had previously arrived as outsiders on the wetland commons, so the conservationists were to wade into the wetland issue, often importing their perspectives from outside. All this was foreshadowed at the height of the war and in the heart of the Fens by the testimonies of two passionate and knowledgeable countrymen, one a bird-watcher, the other a farmer. Their conflicting attitudes to Adventurers’ Fen, which the one painted and the other drained, are both completely understandable in human terms.

      In 1942 Eric Ennion wrote Adventurers Fen, celebrating its birdlife and the haunting beauty of its landscape. His celebration was also a requiem. He wrote:

      The power of a flood. A house collapses under the impact of water in the 1953 east-coast disaster. © HMSO

      It is more than a year since the red and white surveyors’ poles glinted above the reeds, blazing a trail for the draglines that were soon to follow. They came, each with a gaunt arm cutting the gentle skyline, clanking and threatening, laying their tracks as they rumbled along … In a few short weeks the scoops had torn a channel twenty feet wide from end to end, ripping the backbone out of Adventurers’ Fen … When all was dry, men set the fen on fire. Spurts of flame began to flicker here and there and presently leapt up to redden the fringes of the great smoke cloud which hung above them … Reed beds, sedges and sallows vanished in a whirl of flying ashes amid the crackle and the roar.

      I went down afterwards. There was a single gull wheeling over the black land and a wild duck trying to hide in two inches of water at the bottom of a drain. A couple of tractors stood waiting to begin.⁵⁹

      Alan Bloom, who had helped implement the scene described by Ennion, and was unusual in being both a practical man and a writer, published The Farm in the Fen in 1944. He conveys with a sure sense of atmosphere and detail the satisfaction of getting a job done, the feeling of being within a tradition of a long line of settlers of the land, and the sheer hard work that entails: from persuading recalcitrant committees to support his endeavours to the literally back-breaking labour of dragging obstinate lumps of bog oak out of the peat to facilitate ploughing. One morning, Bloom records, after ‘a particularly bitter struggle with an oak’, a Cambridge student came wheeling his bicycle up the drove-way. The young academic coolly eyed the embattled farmer and, commenting upon the destruction wrought upon the fen, looked forward to its return to wilderness after the war, so that it could act as a buffer for the nature reserve of Wicken Fen against the farmed land:

      Against the farmed land, be damned, I thought, and let drive with all the most forceful arguments I could lay my tongue to. But I might have spared myself. When I had finished I could see that it had made not the slightest impression. We were in opposite camps, and he could no more appreciate my line of reasoning than I could see his point of view, and finally we parted.⁶⁰