Surrounded by Water – Almost

Part 3.  The 1947 Floods.  Repairing the Breach and Drying Out

In the darkness and bitter cold of a howling storm at just before midnight on Sunday 16 March 1947 a torrent of water hurtled down through a massive breach into Over Fen, six metres below.  

Already by Friday 14th the water level in the Great Ouse was very high and water was accumulating in the fens, so it was clear that a flood was coming.  Farmers on low ground piled their belongings into whatever vehicles they could get.  Chickens went into boxes and crates for the journey with animal feedstuffs packed beside them along with personal valuables while cattle and pigs were driven alongside towards higher ground.  But they could not rescue the valuable potato crops which had been stored in field clamps since the previous October.

The water rushed out into Over Fen then south to Swavesey and east into Willingham Fen where it soon came up against the flood bank of the Old West River alongside the road between Willingham and Earith.  From the early hours of Monday 17th gangs of workers and prisoners of war set about building a substantial wall of clay bags along the southern bank of the Old West River and by evening they were joined by hundreds of troops, mainly from the Royal Engineers.   Even this enormous group of labourers, working continuously through the night, could not stop the rising tide and by midday on Tuesday it was clear they were going to fail so the retreat was sounded.  The water broke through and hurtled in a fan shape all the way to Aldreth, Haddenham and Sutton, four miles distant, sweeping away straw stacks, potato clamps, outbuildings and even furniture from inside fenland houses which were flooded up to the eaves.

Four days after the breach occurred the flow of water through the gap was much abated.  Engineers were already considering how the 50 metre wide gap could be closed and the novel idea was proposed that the quickest way would be to use a long row of heavy Neptune amphibious military vehicles which were effectively large DUKWs on tracks instead of wheels and weighing up to 18 tonnes unladen.  One Neptune was rapidly obtained and driven out into the washland on the river side of the gap.  It was clearly heavy enough to resist being dragged through the gap and sixteen were quickly allocated to the site.  The plan was to drive the vehicles in a line through the water on the river side to form a wall in the shape of a rectangular box around the breach, then fill the breach with bags of clay.  Tarpaulins were to be lowered from the Neptunes on the river side and held in place with sandbags to reduce the permeability of the wall of metal.  This activity took place on Monday March 24, just a week after the breach occurred.  There were some temporary setbacks through the day but by 7.30 that Monday evening, by the light of searchlights, the amphibians were in place and when the tarpaulins were lowered down over the tracks and weighted down the flow of water through the breach decreased.  Repairing the bank using bags of clay went on all night with very good progress made by dawn.  It took two more days and nights to completely finish the job.  A thousand troops were involved in “Operation Neptune” over the three days and three nights, at the end of which the worst breach in the Fens had been repaired.

On Sunday 30 March, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester arrived at Bluntisham station and were taken under military escort to see where the breach had occurred and to witness the devastation across the wide expanse of flood water as far as Sutton and Haddenham.  

The breaches in the riverbanks were closed remarkably quickly.  The next task was to lift all the floodwater from the Fens and pour it back into the rivers as soon as possible because fen soil is of very high quality, capable of growing large yields of a wide range of high-value crops and the country desperately needed home-grown food.  On Friday 21 March, the Ministry of Agriculture contacted all bodies who might have large capacity pumps including the National Fire Service, the Admiralty, the Army, the Metropolitan Water Board, local authorities and private firms.  By Monday 24 March, several large pumps were already arriving in the Fens and so were some of the more than a hundred firemen who volunteered to man them.  Additionally, seventeen massive pumps arrived from Holland.  Altogether about 260 large pumps were assembled.  Areas of shallow flooding were cleared of water by the end of April, but It was the end of May before almost all of the water had been removed from all of the submerged fenland.  The slowest restoration was in Haddenham Fen where the water was up to 5 metres deep in places and here the pumps were not removed until July.

The farmers and their families returned to their farms and earnestly set about repairing their homes and outbuildings.  At the same time, they got on with late drilling and planting their crops as soon as the soil surface was dry enough.  Although yields were modest, nearly all of the flooded land carried a crop that year.